Higher speeds drive data centre switch growth

“In line with our expectations, the data center switch market has not only been resilient to the pandemic, but has actually benefited from it,” said Sameh Boujelbene, Senior Director at Dell’Oro Group. “As digital transformation initiatives have been accelerated by the pandemic, we are seeing strong growth in the Cloud and at the edge. Towards the end of our forecast horizon, we are predicting that Cloud Service Providers will drive more than 50 percent of the spending on data center switches and will propel the adoption of 400 Gbps, 800 Gbps, and 1600 Gbps speeds.

“It will be very interesting to see how the various data center switch speeds continue to bifurcate. We are not only seeing a divergence between the Cloud and the non-Cloud segments in terms of their roadmap of migration to higher speeds but we are also seeing a divergence amongst the hyperscalers. Currently, each hyperscaler is making a distinct choice in terms of switch chips, switch radix, and network topology. We expect this divergence to increase when they migrate to next-generation networks in order to accommodate the need for new workloads such as artificial intelligence and machine learning,” added Boujelbene.