The market for data centre switches is set for a major shift towards higher performance levels, according to research from a leading independent analyst firm.
Dell’Oro Group has predicted that adoption of 800 Gbps switches will rise faster than demand for 400 Gbps in the next four years, comprising more than 25% of all data centre switch ports by 2025.
Dell’Oro Senior Research Director Sameh Boujelbene said the market appears to have proven resilient to the effects of the COVID pandemic, and suggested it will recover well from its low, single-digit revenue decline in 2020: “We continue to believe that the Ethernet switch data centre market will return to growth in 2021 and be able to exceed its 2019 pre-pandemic revenue level,” she added.
Her research among end-users and system and component vendors has suggested that the pandemic has in fact amplified the importance of networking and accelerated multi-year digital transformation projects, and that these trends are expected to bring major changes to data centre networks and potentially generate additional market revenue.
But the road ahead for switch sales is not without challenges: “Our interviews with major vendors revealed that a number of them are already operating at full manufacturing capacity and that supply challenges will continue through the remainder of the year with a potentially more pronounced impact on market performance and the pricing environment,” she warned. “If this is true, our forecast may prove to be too high, as it doesn’t currently take into consideration the impact of these various supply issues.”
Separate research from Dell’Oro Group shows that the optical transport market is also set for growth over the next four years. The market, largely driven by WDM equipment, is forecast to increase in size annually for the next five years, reaching nearly $18 billion. Vendors likely to benefit include Ciena, Cisco and Infinera.
Turnium to join forces with IBM on SD-WAN edge
Turnium Technology Group has announced a collaboration with IBM to onboard its cloud-native SD-WAN edge solution to the IBM Cloud for Telecommunications. Turnium said the move will help service providers and enterprises deploy, manage and access edge compute applications in secured, private, networks, using the public or private cloud, on-premise or edge environment of their choosing.
Turnium said its containerized SD-WAN edge solution is designed to simplify the process of adding and managing edge devices, with performance and scalability designed to make it cost effective for enterprises to extend private SD-WAN networking to all sites using broadband, fixed wireless, LTE/4G, 5G, or fibre. Environments including bare metal, virtual machines, or container environments like RedHat OpenShift, OKD, nspawn. Various Linux operating system distributions are also available.
“We’re very excited to be working with IBM to bring our containerized managed SD-WAN solution to the IBM Cloud for Telecommunications,” said Johan Arnet, CEO at Turnium. “We have worked hard to make SD-WAN simple to deploy, manage, and secure to help customers interconnect their hybrid multi-cloud deployments. Cloud-native SD-WAN can help organizations be more agile with their corporate or telco networks.”
“Collaborating with ecosystem partners like Turnium on the IBM Cloud for Telecommunications can provide telecom operators access to technologies designed to help them scale and innovate,” said Evaristus Mainsah, GM, IBM Hybrid Cloud and Edge Ecosystem. “We share the same vision on the importance of an open, hybrid cloud foundation.”
Turnium is one of a number of SD-WAN vendors to strike public cloud deals this year. Cisco, Fortinet, and Versa announced integrations with Google Cloud so that their SD-WAN customers can use the cloud provider’s private backbone for middle-mile connectivity.
CloudKnox buyout adds Zero Trust to Microsoft security offer
Microsoft has made further inroads into the security space with the acquisition of CloudKnox, a startup that has developed a multi-cloud permissions management platform to protect cloud infrastructure and identities.
Microsoft has said that CloudKnox will provide a lift for Azure Active Directory’s cloud identity and access services, and give customers granular visibility, continuous monitoring, and automated remediation for hybrid and multi-cloud permissions. The move takes Microsoft deeper into Zero Trust security, which is all about ensuring that only properly verified users and devices are allowed access to corporate resources. Other leading names in the Zero Trust space include NetFoundry, Palo Alto and ZScaler.
CloudKnox Security is Microsoft’s fourth cybersecurity acquisition so far this year. It has also bought threat intelligence start-up RiskIQ, as well as IoT security players CyberX and Refirm Labs.
