According to IHS Markit, datacentre switch revenue totals $2.8 billion in Q1 2018-- a 12% Y-o-Y increase, with bare metal and purpose-built switch revenues growing by 35% and 15% Y-o-Y respectively.
Both traditional and white box vendors currently offer bare metal switches, while purpose-built switches embedded with data plane programmable silicon from Broadcom, Cavium, and Barefoot Networks are on the increase. For instance, no.2 datacentre switching vendor Arista has released several swtiches with programmable silicon from each of the 3 aforementioned companies.
“Bare metal switch shipments continue their long-term growth as hyperscale and tier 2 cloud service providers (CSPs), telcos adopting NFV, and large enterprises increase their deployments worldwide”, IHS says. “A mix of bare metal and purpose-built switches using programmable silicon from a handful of chip vendors continues to displace traditional switches in the market.”
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