In a push to capitalize on the expected near- and long-term growth in the Ethernet switch market Brocade launched a new series of Ethernet switches optimized for virtualized data centers.

Recognizing the growing industry adoption of virtualization technologies to achieve shared IT architectures, the vendor designed its new FCX switches with capability to be stacked "horizontally across server racks to create a single logical switch."

According to this month's report by Dell'Oro Group, an IT industry analyst firm, the Ethernet switch market will resume growth in 2010 and continue on an upward trajectory through 2014. Growth will be driven by large virtualized data center deployments as companies consolidate their IT capacity. Dell'Oro projects the number of GbE ports shipped to grow from about 124 million in 2009 to about 225 million in 2014.

IDC, another market research organization, predicts that the Ethernet switch market will grow to $22.9 billion by 2014. IDC also said outlook for 2010 was positive since network upgrade projects were one of top two priorities during the year.

The new Brocade series of 10/100/1000 Mbps with 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplink top-of-rack switches come with either 24 or 48 ports. Stacked switches provide up to 40 Gbps of switching bandwidth between stack members. An optional 4-port 10 GbE module doubles 10 GbE connections between network layers.

Addressing increasing density in data centers, FCX switches are compact (1U form factors) and feature reversible front-to-back cooling

The units have hardware-based sFlow traffic monitoring capabilities and Brocade IronShield 360 for protection from network attacks.

Other players in the 10 GbE market include 3Com, Arista, Blade, Cisco and Juniper.