By Telecom Lead Team: Global revenue for data center
network equipment is up 12 percent sequentially in Q3 2011, with all segments
posting growth, including general purpose, purpose-built and blade data center
Ethernet switches, application delivery controllers (ADCs) and WAN optimization
appliances.
The data center network equipment market is also up 12
percent year-over-year (from Q3 2010).
The North American data center equipment market had the
strongest regional performance in Q3 2011, up 16 percent sequentially. Asia’s
sequential growth slowed significantly but remains up an astounding 39 percent
year-over-year. Europe’s Q3 2011 results are in positive territory despite
continued economic concerns.
Overall data center network equipment leaders Cisco and
F5 increased their revenue and market share in 3Q11, while #3 player HP saw a
drop in both, allowing F5 to jump into the #2 spot for the first time in a
year.
Wow is the only word that can accurately characterize
the performance of the purpose-built data center Ethernet switching market at
the end of the third quarter, with year-over-year gains of over 800 percent.
That really tells the story of the data center network equipment sector: we are
on the path to convergence in earnest,” said Sam Barnett, directing analyst for
data center and cloud at Infonetics Research.
The resurgence in data center upgrades, virtualization,
and data/storage/traffic growth bodes well for all categories in the data
center network equipment market. Once final 2011 figures are in, Infonetics
expects the market to be up about 6 percent over 2010, and expects growth to
nudge back up into double-digit percent territory in 2012.
Recently, Infonetics announced
that the average numbers of medium, large, and super size data centers owned by
service providers that offer data center and cloud services is set to grow over
the next 2 years, with large and super sized data centers growing the most.
Virtualization and network convergence allows these
operators to grow sustainably to meet the demand for cloud services.
