Arista Networks, white-box vendors, and China’s Star-Net Ruijie Communication drove the global data center switch market during the fourth quarter of last year, accounting for 90% of that market's double-digit growth, according to a Dell'Oro Group report.  

The sales surge boosted switch revenues to record levels for the quarter and full year, “despite a macro-economic environment that continues to be defined by limited supply and elevated logistic costs,” Sameh Boujelbene, senior research director at Dell’Oro Group, said in a statement. 

“What was also remarkable is that the robust performance was broad-based across all major market segments: cloud service providers [SPs], Telco SPs, and large enterprises, all of which grew double-digits and reached an all-time high in sales for the full year 2021,” she added.

Arista was one of the vendors that grabbed most of the revenue growth for the quarter. As cloud service providers recovered earlier during the pandemic and grew faster than the rest of the market, “Arista is executing very well” in this segment, Boujelbene wrote in response to questions.

Beyond cloud providers, Arista also penetrated an increasing number of large enterprise customers. Plus, “it appears that Arista had a head start in terms of planning for component shortages and building a healthy inventory level, which seemed to have helped them especially in the first half of 2021,” she explained.

Shipments of 400 Gb/s data center Ethernet switches more than doubled last year, exceeding 2 million ports. Those devices accounted for 10% of the overall market, according to the report.

The firm found that the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of high-speed switches and the need to upgrade networks to accommodate digital transformation expedition and cloud adoption, Boujelbene said. 

This further pushed 400 Gb/s switch deployments to expand beyond hyperscalers, reaching smaller cloud service providers and large enterprises, she added. 

Additionally, “in terms of supply, vendors are prioritizing early life cycle products in their inventory build-up strategies to help mitigate the risk of obsolescence,” Boujelbene explained.