Market research firm, Dell’Oro Group has released the latest iteration of its Group Ethernet Switch – Data Center Five Year Forecast Report.
The report is designed to provide an overview of market trends including manufacturer revenue, port shipments, and average selling price forecasts for a number of technologies. These include: modular and fixed by port speed and fixed managed and unmanaged by port speed. We forecast the following port speeds: 1000Mb/s; 10Gb/s; 25Gb/s; 40Gb/s; 50Gb/s; 100Gb/s; 200Gb/s; 400Gb/s.
While 400Gb/s are forecast to surpass 15 million switch ports by 2023, the report also finds that 100Gb/s ports are expected to peak in 2020. They will, however, still comprise more than 30 per cent of data centre switch ports in the next five years.
Sameh Boujelbene, senior director at Dell’Oro Group commented: ‘The first wave of 400Gb/s switch systems based on 12.8Tb/s chips were introduced in the market in the second half of 2018. However, we do not expect material adoption of 400Gb/s until 2020 due to the lack of high volume, low cost 400Gb/s optics. The only cloud service provider that started deploying 400Gb/s was Google, which opted for special 400Gb/s optics with an earlier time-to-market. Meanwhile, we expect other cloud service providers, for instance Amazon, Facebook or Microsoft, to keep deploying 100Gb/s, and to probably consume the 12.8Tb/s chips in the form of high–density 100Gb/s switch systems to reduce cost.’
The report also provides more details about the timing of 100Gb/s, 200Gb/s, 400Gb/s, and 800Gb/s, and how the use cases may vary depending on the SerDes lane and market segment driving the speed.
