Research from Infonetics shows that last year was a strong year for data centre network equipment sales, due to a rebound from bare-bones 2009 spending levels and, more importantly, fundamental trends favouring investments in the data centre, such as the explosion of content and traffic, use of virtualization, and increasingly, cloud-based services and architectures.

For 2011, tempering is expected but still robust growth in sales, and the biggest opportunities for vendors is in helping companies grow their data centre infrastructure sustainably, such as through the use of products that dramatically increase price-to-performance or improve management in highly virtualized environments.

Data centre network equipment market highlights

• In 2010, the worldwide data centre network equipment market, data centre Ethernet switches, application delivery controllers (ADCs), WAN optimization appliances—jumped more than 50% over 2009, to almost $8 billion
• Data centre switches, by far the largest segment, are transitioning from general-purpose to purpose-built equipment, as evidenced by a near-doubling in purpose-built equipment revenue quarter-over-quarter
• Cisco leads the data centre Ethernet switching market by far, with over 80% market share
• ADC market leader F5 maintains its strong #1 position, although revenue share declined as rival Cisco turned the corner
• The WAN optimization market is a 3-horse race between Blue Coat, Cisco, and Riverbed

Enterprise data center survey highlights

• North American enterprises plan to increase their data center infrastructure spending by an average of 25% in 2011
• Cloud technologies will play a major role in this expansion, and are among the top 3 expected data centre changes
• Interest in 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) equals or exceeds interest in 40GE, despite the lack of available products
• Fibre Channel is the most used SAN technology, but respondents show strong interest in next generation FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) to streamline their data centre networks