Top-of-rack 10GE switches to hit $500M

SAN JOSE, Calif. – The market for 10 Gbit/second Ethernet switches geared for rack-mounted servers grew a whopping 300 percent in the last quarter, an indicator a major upgrade cycle is underway in business networks, said an analyst.

Top-of-rack Ethernet switches will generate more than $500 million in revenues this year, according to a new report from market watcher Dell'Oro Group (Redwood City, Calif.). The switches literally sit on top of a cabinet of rack-mounted servers, handling traffic to and from larger aggregation switches in a data center.

“We are in the beginning of the most significant network upgrade ever in the data center,” said Alan Weckel, director of Ethernet switch market research at Dell’Oro, speaking in a press release. “Customers are migrating servers from multiple Gbit connections to two 10GE connections," he said.

End users are also beginning to adopt technologies that merge Ethernet and Fibre Channel traffic on high capacity, low latency networks. "These are significant changes which, when combined with vendor competition, will lead to significant market transitions,” Weckel added.

Less than half today's Ethernet switch vendors offer purpose-built 10GE top-of-rack switches, according to the report.  Current suppliers include Arista, Brocade, Cisco, Dell, Extreme Networks, Force 10, Hewlett-Packard and Juniper Networks.

Cisco, which entered the server business last year, was the leader in top-of-rack switches in the second quarter of this year, the report said. HP led the pack in the blade switch segment.

The new report is part of an expansion of Dell'Oro's coverage of 10 Gbit Ethernet switching. The market watcher now provides more coverage on topics such as top-of-rack switches and blade switches. It also supplies a break-out of 10GE copper and fiber ports, including 10GBase-T and SFP+ direct attach copper ports.