Analyst says data center SDN market to grow over 70% just in 2015

The telecommunications, networks and data center IT industries analyst Dell’Oro Group says that the hyperscale data centers of Amazon AWS, Google, and Microsoft Azure will be among the big drivers upcoming 25 GE and 50 GE equipment deployments.

According to the analyst's new 2015 Data Center SDN Advanced Research Report, the software defined networking (SDN) market is forecast to grow more than 70% just in 2015, versus 2014. 2015 marked an important milestone in SDN, notes the analyst, with many Ethernet Switch architectures ratified and production deployments under way.

“SDN’s impact on the Ethernet Switch market increased significantly in 2015, as deployments expanded beyond the large cloud providers,” says Alan Weckel, vice president at Dell’Oro Group.

The new report evaluates the data center network and identifies the equipment that will likely be impacted by SDN in the next several years, including Ethernet switches, application delivery controllers, and network security appliances.

The report also outlines the various disruptive elements to the Ethernet Switch market in the data center, including SDN, the cloud, virtualization, and the impact of white box switching.

“It is clear that, by 2020, data centers will look significantly different from today’s," adds Dell'Oro's Weckel. "We are already seeing an impact on the overall networking and IT markets as enterprise customer spend stagnates while spend from cloud providers such as AWS and Azure explodes. As we look towards next generation 25 GE and 50 GE server access we expect to see significant disruption amongst the vendors -- with Dell’s planned acquisition of EMC being a prelude to further market consolidation,” Weckel stated.

The report also reveals vendor placement in the data center Ethernet switch market, with rankings of the market's leaders, including Arista, Brocade, Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Extreme, Huawei, and Juniper.

Find out how to purchase the report.