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Consolidation Drives 10 Gig Ethernet Growth

Level 3 says data center consolidations are boosting sales of 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports.

Andrew Schmitt from Nyquist Capital has posted some notes and observations from the LightReading Ethernet Conference on Oct. 15-17. This includes a summary of the keynote from Level 3 (LVLT) senior VP Jeff Tench on trends in their Gigabit Ethernet business.

Andrew shares a number of interesting data points from the presentation. Here are a few highlights:

  • Level3 has 500 active 10GbE ports today.
  • Customers are approaching them looking for 10GbE hookups as they consolidate data centers into a single location to reduce costs.
  • (Growth of edge connections) is driving a need for very large, cheap 10GbE switches with 64 to 512 10GbE ports. This was echoed by Equinix (EQIX) two days later at the Gilder Telecosm.

When a data center consolidation reduces the number of facilities, it concentrates more bandwidth-apps in a single location. For companies consolidating a network of data centers, a consolidation also can extend the geographic distance between data centers and create lag issues (as reported by the Defense Contract Management Agency). That's where the bigger pipes come in handy. Read more at Nyquist Capital.