An IHS Markit survey looked at the physical equipment necessary in data centers to provide the foundation for high-performance compute, storage, and networking.

The Data Center Strategies and Leadership Global Service Provider survey was conducted in 2017, with 20 service providers who are representative of the market.

Cisco, Juniper Networks, Huawei, Arista, and H3C were identified as the top five data center Ethernet switch vendors according to service provider respondents ranking the top three vendors in each of eight selection criteria. Cisco and Juniper tied for leadership with on average of 58 percent of respondents placing them in the top three across the eight categories. Huawei was third (38 percent), followed by Arista (28 percent), and H3C (18 percent).

“When selecting a vendor, respondents are heavily weighing factors such as product reliability, service and support, pricing model, and security,” said Cliff Grossner, senior research director at IHS Markit.

For those unfamiliar with H3C, it’s a Chinese company that provides compute, storage, networking, and security products. It also provides technology for big data, edge computing, and artificial intelligence. According to its website, New H3C is also the exclusive provider of HPE-branded servers and storage products as well as technical services in China.

Respondents to IHS Markit’s survey indicated they expect a 1.5x increase in the average number of physical servers in their data centers by 2019.

Ninety-three percent of respondents said a top data center investment driver was scalability. Other top drivers include rapid application deployment (87 percent), automation (73 percent), and security (73 percent).

Other key findings from the IHS Markit survey include:

  • On average, 90 percent of servers are expected to be running hypervisors or containers by 2019, up from 74 percent today.
  • The top data center fabric features most desired are high speed and support for network virtualization protocols (80 percent of respondents each).
  • All of the respondents intend to increase investment in sold-state drive (SSD) storage, while 80 percent will increase investment in software defined storage.
  • The workloads most deployed by respondents were generic IT applications (53 percent of respondents), followed by ERP and generic virtual machines (VMs) (20 percent each).