Year-end growth for 2013 has propelled 10GbE data center switch port shipments past those of 1GbE according to a report from Crehan Research.

The report suggests since the product was first introduced in 2001, 10GbE data center switching has overcome numerous hurdles to majority adoption.

It suggests 10GbE has overcome issues including very low port-density switches, prices prohibitive to volume data center deployments, high-priced optical pluggable modules, limited default or free 10GbE networking on volume rack servers and two major recessions in the aftermath of the housing and dot-com bubbles.

Crehan Research’s president Seamus Crehan said: “Despite a network traffic growth curve that turned out to be way above most expectations, this technology was encumbered by numerous obstacles on its way to becoming a majority of data center connections."

Crehan Research said it expects that the majority adoption of 10GbE data center switches will help enable deployments of the higher-speed, next-gen switches needed to uplink and aggregate the growing number of 10GbE data center connections.