Forecast: 10GbE To Be The Top-Selling Ethernet Switch By 2016

Sales of 10 gigabit per second (Gbps) Ethernet Switches are expected to reach $13 billion by 2016 and will constitute nearly half of a total $28 billion Ethernet Switch market by then, a forecast from the research firm Dell'Oro Group states. And even as data center operators upgrade from 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) Switches to 10GbE in order to handle exponentially larger volumes of network data traffic, sales of even faster 40GbE and 100GbE switches will also be picking up as well.

By 2016 sales of 40 and 100GbE products will amount to $3 billion, Dell'Oro said in its five-year forecast for the Ethernet Switch market. The company, which is focused exclusively on networking and telecommunications equipment market research, expects the strongest growth in 10GbE Ethernet in 2013 and 2014 as enterprise data centers invest in the technology for server access through a mix of connectivity options for blade and rack-mounted servers.

Growth in 10GbE deployments will be driven by continued adoption of virtualization, meaning servers will be running at higher utilization rates than do non-virtualized servers, said Alan Weckel, senior director at Dell'Oro Group. Another driver is expected to be the expected server refresh cycle prompted by the release of Intel's new Romley microprocessor platform, which will provide the faster server throughput that is needed for virtualization.

"Romley comes out in the first half of 2012, so 2012 is going to be the time that enterprises go through qualification tests of the new servers and new switches. The hockey stick up is [in] 2013," Weckel said.

Vendors in this burgeoning market include Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Brocade, Cisco Systems, Extreme Networks, Dell, HP, IBM, and Juniper Networks, but Weckel declined to say which specific vendors Dell'Oro thinks will benefit more from 10GbE sales than others.

Vendors are seeing the same pick-up that Dell'Oro sees.

"This is the year of 10 gig," said Arpit Joshipura, chief marketing officer for Force 10 Networks, which was acquired by Dell in August 2011. "All of a sudden, this year we will see a lot more 10 gigabit deployments and it's already starting to happen in our customer base."

Joshipura, who came to Dell from Force 10, said Force 10 developed the first 10GbE switches about 10 years ago and would have hoped the technology would have caught on sooner but is nonetheless happy that sales are picking up. However, while the rate of growth of 10GbE switch sales is strong, Dell still sells far more 1GbE switches than 10GbE ones. Based on unit sales, he estimated 90 percent of sales are of the previous generation 1GbE products.

Likewise, Cisco Systems sees strong growth in the 10GbE market and crossed the 10 million unit sales mark in December 2011, said Shashi Kiran, senior director of data center and enterprise networking at Cisco.

Kiran said Cisco currently enjoys a 76 percent share of the 10GbE market and that, although the majority of their sales are also still of 1GbE products, the growth rate for 10GbE is higher. He also said that as more 10GbE switches are deployed, Cisco is acting proactively to see what other points on a network may appear as "choke points" for the faster 10GbE traffic.

Kiran also said unit sales of 10GbE products are driven by declining prices, which makes it easier for customers to justify purchasing 10GbE to replace 1GbE on their networks.

Dell'Oro's Weckel provided some specifics: Across all vendors, the average selling price of a 10GbE product was $388 per port in 2011, down from $818 per port in 2008.

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Enterasys Addresses Wired-Wireless Pain

Network equipment vendor Enterasys is tackling the growing problem of managing wired and wireless devices with the latest addition to its suite of fabric network management technology, the OneFabric Edge Architecture. The combined wired-wireless management fabric relieves a number of network management headaches, especially in situations where the wired network is often managed by one vendor and the wireless network by another, says the company.

"Wired is a pain in the butt now," said Craig Mathias, a principal analyst at Farpoint Group. With wireless devices ubiquitous in the workplace, he wonders why anyone would use a wired network.

For now, though, wired and wireless networks have to work together and need to be merged. "The idea of thinking of the network as a single unified entity ... is one of the key emerging themes that I think you're going to see a lot of emphasis on over the next couple of years," Mathias said.

The OneFabric Edge features an end-to-end integration of the wireless local area network (WLAN) and the wired infrastructure and integrates Enterasys' security and management features with application-aware capabilities that aid compliance and service level agreements (SLAs). The product introduces what Enterasys calls the Wireless Services Engine (WiSE), a WLAN controller for application services, which the company said gives customers greater flexibility for deploying edge access in virtual, physical and cloud environments.

Lastly, the OneFabric Edge introduces the K-Series modular switch, which provides visibility into network traffic to determine location, identification, and overall management capabilities of the converged wired and wireless network. Enterasys says the K-Series switch helps manage environments in which employees bring their own wireless devices into work to run on the corporate network.

Both the Enterasys data center fabric and edge fabric systems are jointly managed by the OneFabric Control Center management console.

While applauding Enterasys' innovation, Mathias said it faces considerable competition in the data center fabric space from companies such as Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, Brocade and others -- as well as in the edge network space.Although network and edge fabric technology from those and other vendors is catching on, a recent survey of the people who buy networking equipment showed some caution about embracing new technology too soon. Information Week analytics released a survey earlier this month that showed that IT buyers favored products built to industry standards over those with the latest innovation, including network fabrics.

The report noted "a general wariness of proprietary features, where many cutting-edge capabilities are in flux--either the standards aren't complete or are yet to be widely adopted."

Those kinds of reservations are warranted, but Enterasy says its approach to fabric computing is different from that of competitors, noting that it uses an open architecture based on networking standards and that its fabric offerings are compatible with other vendors' legacy systems, something fabric competitors can't always say.

The difference between Enterasys and competitors is also based on different definitions of the term "fabric," added Mark Townsend, director of solutions architecture for Enterasys. Enterasys endorses the research firm Gartner's definition of a network fabric as "taking a collection of resources, such as a network, and to unify those under a single control plane to deliver an application," he said.

Other vendors define fabric in terms of a "topology," he added, referring to the multi-path connections between switches and routers designed to make networks run faster, more efficiently and to be flatter.

"If you look at our competition, they are looking at fabric as a topology and the topologies that they are talking about are based on proprietary protocols," Townsend said.

While buyers may be wary of fabric technology, this happens all the time when new technology is introduced, particularly in networking, said Mathias. "There's always a degree of risk when you shift from the old modes of thought to the new modes of thought," he said, adding that vendors need to better educate prospective customers to overcome their reservations.

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Intel Makes Exascale-Bet on InfinBand-Based Supercomputing

Intel, which played a key role in the creation of the InfiniBand high-speed networking standard a decade ago, has come full circle and bought the IB assets of Qlogic, one of the two remaining companies still actively pushing this technology. While $125 million is chump change for a company that netted $3.4 billion in profits last quarter, Intel says the acquisition will enhance its networking portfolio and provide scalable high-performance computing (HPC) fabric technology as well as support the company's vision of innovating on fabric architectures to achieve ExaFLOP/s performance by 2018. At a hundred times faster than today's fastest supercomputers, it's an aggressive move, seeking to accelerate performance to a quintillion computer operations per second.

The InfiniBand specification defines a low-latency, high-bandwidth input/output architecture used to interconnect servers, communications infrastructure equipment, storage and embedded systems. It is a true fabric architecture that leverages switched, point-to-point channels with data transfers today at up to 120 gigabits per second, both in chassis backplane applications as well as through external copper and optical fiber connections.

Last year the InfiniBand Trade Association reported the technology is seeing continued growth on the TOP500 list of supercomputing sites. InfiniBand connects the majority of the top 100 with 61 percent, the top 200 with 58 percent and the top 300 with 51 percent. The total number of InfiniBand-connected CPU cores on the TOP500 list has grown 65 percent, from 1.4 million in Nov. 2009 to 2.3 million in Nov. 2010.

IDC says the HPC market was worth $19 billion in 2010, up 10 percent, and expected to see 7 percent growth through 2015. While Ethernet remains the leader, the research company predicts InfiniBand will continue to take market share from proprietary interconnects.

Supercomputing is the key to the deal, says Intel. While the percentage of HPC CPU shipments will drop from 15 percent to 12 percent between 2010-2015, it still represents a sizable chunk of the total market. However, next year the top 100 supercomputing CPU (total addressable market) will reach 1 million units, double in 2015, and reach 8 million units by 2019.

Intel says InfiniBand was seen as the missing piece to developing a scalable fabric by 2018. The acquisition also rounds out the company's Ethernet portfolio, it says. HPC is one of thetwo key pillars of growth within Intel's data center business, along with cloud.

The other company remaining in the IB market is Mellanox Technologies), which along with Qlogic, has been an Intel partner. Oracle uses InfiniBand technology in its database appliances and bought a 10.2 percent share of Mellanox in late 2010.

The Qlogic deal, which is is expected to close this quarter, involves the product lines of and certain assets related to its InfiniBand business. A significant number of the employees associated with this business are expected to join Intel's network and communications unit.

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F5 Networks 'Fixes' Data Center Security

Arguing that multiple point appliances intended to secure a network only add to complexity without providing the intended protection, F5 Networks is introducing what it calls a Data Center Firewall to combine multiple security solutions into one appliance. The appliance, called BIG-IP model 11050 and carrying a starting price of $129,995, delivers such security features as dynamic threat defense, DDoS protection, protocol security, SSL termination and a network firewall.

"The current environment just doesn't scale, it doesn't extend and it doesn't respond. We think this model is broken and it's very, very real in our customer base today," said Mark Vondemkamp, director of product management for F5.

ICSA Labs, an industry accreditation body for network firewall solution, certified the F5 BIG-IP product family as a secure socket layer (SSL), transport layer security (TLS) and virtual private network (VPN) compliant appliance line.

The appliance is designed to respond to some of the latest types of attacks on networks, Vondemkamp said, such as dedicated denial of service (DDoS) attacks where web sites are pinged millions of times to bring them down. Lately this has been done for political reasons such as the attacks on sites targeted in the wake of the WikiLeaks document dumps of U.S. State Department cables in 2011.

F5 has also seen a rise in the number of blended threats on the Internet, combining a DDoS attack with an application-level attack. Lastly, the BIG-IP appliance protects against zero day attacks, in which a vulnerability in a software program, such as Microsoft or Adobe, is discovered before a patch for it can be developed and deployed.

The array of point solutions to address these threats -- network firewalls, DDoS appliances, domain name server (DNS) appliances, web application firewalls and load balancers -- are difficult to manage, can be a drag on network performance, and can result in multiple points of failure, said Vandemkamp.

"The traditional approach needs to be replaced by a unified security architecture," he said.

F5, in the leaders quadrant in the Gartner research "Magic Quadrant" analysis of SSL and VPN security vendors, released in December 2011, shares top spot with Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks, while competitor Citrix Systems is identified as a viable "challenger."

However, in its analysis of vendors, Gartner faults F5 for lacking an Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) capability in its products. IPsec is a protocol for securing IP communications by authenticating and encrypting each IP packet in a communications session."F5 faces an uphill contest with vendors that offer both SSL and IPsec, and should reconsider whether to build or acquire client-based IPsec support," Gartner reported.

That aside, the F5 approach of combining different point solutions into one powerful data center firewall is a viable approach, said Jeff Wilson, a principal security analyst at Infonetics research.

Even though the typical enterprise data center may not be as much of a target of a malicious DDoS attack as would a financial institution or a government agency, data centers are still high-value assets that need enhanced protection for today's threats, Wilson said.

"Since data centers typically process a lot of traffic, have high bandwidth connections and have a lot of high-capacity gear, when attacks are aimed at them they tend to be very fast attacks, but the typical firewall isn't designed to handle a DDoS attack," he said. "The scale of the attacks is really what's at issue in a data center."

F5 compared its BIG-IP 11050 to the Juniper SRX 3400 on throughput, connections per second and the number of concurrent connections it can support. Wilson says that's because Juniper has a significant foothold in the data center and, like F5 and other network security vendors, is trying to expand its presence in those data centers. He identified HP's Tipping Point and CheckPoint as among other vendors going up against F5.

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