The Ethernet switch market is poised for continued growth, expected to reach US$28bn in 2016, and this growth will largely be driven by sales into the data center sector, according to a new report by the research firm Dell’Oro Group.

Alan Weckel, senior director at Dell’Oro, said the group expects 2013 and 2014 to become major growth years for the Ethernet switch market, driven by migration of servers to 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE). The networking standard currently enjoys rapid growth in the rate of adoption as applications require more and more bandwidth.

“We believe that in 2013, most large enterprises will upgrade to 10Gb Ethernet for server access through a mix of connectivity options, ranging from blade servers, SFP+ direct attach and 10G Base-T,” Weckel said.

“We further anticipate that in 2014, small and medium businesses will upgrade to 10Gb Ethernet.”

Today’s leading Ethernet-switch vendors in the data center space include Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Brocade, Cisco, Extreme, Dell, HP, IBM, and Juniper.

The 10GbE standard offers 10 times the performance of its industry-standard predecessor 1Gb Ethernet, yet the transition from one to the other is fairly simple. According to an Intel whitepaper, 10GbE is “a natural choice for expanding, extending and upgrading existing Ethernet networks.”

In its whitepaper titled 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology overview, Intel offers several reasons to make its case:

Existing Ethernet infrastructure is easily interoperable with 10GbE and technology built around the newer standard offers lower cost of ownership than the alternatives, according to Intel. It also draws on similar management tools and a common skill base with those used with existing Ethernet deployments.

The standard allows for flexible network design with server, switch and router connections. Finally, standards-based products provide proven interoperability between products by multiple vendors.