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IDC: Steady growth for IT infrastructure products spending

IDC maps growth in IT infrastructure products spending, cPacket beefs up monitoring for 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps networks, and Dell agrees to resell Metaswitch's composables package.

Eamon McCarthy Earls
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Published: 12 Apr 2018

Total spending for IT infrastructure products will grow 10.9% in 2018, reaching $52.3 billion, according to the most recent Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker issued by IDC. public cloud data centers generated the most spending, accounting for almost two-thirds of the total, with an annual growth topping 11%, IDC said.

On-premises private clouds represented more than 61% of private cloud infrastructure spending, while off-premises private clouds generated 13%. Spending on private cloud IT infrastructure products is set to grow 9.1% in 2018.

Over the next five years, IDC projected off-premises cloud IT infrastructure spending will grow at a 10.8% compound annual growth rate, reaching $55.7 billion. Cloud IT infrastructure spending will surpass traditional IT infrastructure the same year.

Within cloud IT segments, Ethernet switches and compute platforms will account for most of the spending, growing at 20.9% and 12.4%, respectively.

The report projected a 2% decline in spending for noncloud IT infrastructure products in 2018.

"Growing expansion of digital transformation initiatives enables further adoption of cloud-based solutions around the globe. This will result in a continuous shift in the profile of IT infrastructure buyers. SaaS, PaaS [platform-as-a-service] and IaaS [infrastructure-as-a-service] offerings address a broad range of business and IT needs of enterprises, from 'lift-and-shift' to emerging workloads," said Natalya Yezhkova, research director for enterprise storage at IDC, in a statement. "As a result, service providers' demand for IT Infrastructure for delivering these offerings is growing steadily, making them as a group a major buyer of compute, storage and networking products," she added.

CPacket increases 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps monitoring

CPacket Networks announced new features in its cClear platform to boost fault detection and monitoring for 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps networks. The new features include Encapsulated Remote Switch Port Analyzer Type III (ERSPAN) for 40 Gbps networks and standard timestamp extraction for all network feeds originating from third-party devices. ERSPAN is a way to transport mirrored traffic across an IP network.

Additionally, cPacket beefed up cSearch and dynamic truncation with features intended to improve network visibility. A smart filters feature supports traffic filtering and full packet inspection.

The release comes as 100 Gigabit Ethernet port shipments begin to surpass both 10 GbE and 40 GbE shipments in 2018.

"As 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps networks become the new norm for large data centers, customers need to have the proper tools in place to prevent network downtime and increased operational costs," said Brendan O'Flaherty, CEO of cPacket, in a statement. "Features such as ERSPAN termination, timestamping and dynamic truncation have become essentials in the tool sets of network personnel challenged with harnessing network traffic," he added.

Dell to resell Metaswitch composable portfolio

Dell EMC said it would resell Metaswitch's portfolio of Composable Network Protocols, or CNPs, allowing companies that use Dell's open switches to employ the protocols in their operations.

Metaswitch's protocol stacks -- more comprehensive versions than the open source versions used in Microsoft Sonic or OpenSwitch -- will be initially used to underpin deployments supporting data center interconnect and wide-area MPLS routing, according to Drew Schulke, vice president of networking at Dell EMC.

The CNPs enable applications and services that can be run from any white box component, encompassing both Layer 2 and Layer 3 services. The routing and control planes operate on top of any open network operating system, Metaswitch said.

"Our new white box and open network operating system introduces groundbreaking capabilities and flexible purchasing options, while reducing the risk of moving to a fully disaggregated architecture," said Martin Lund, CEO of Metaswitch, in a statement.

Dell will bundle the CNPs within OS10, a Linux-based platform it introduced in 2016.

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