Force10 Networks Increases 10 Gigabit Ethernet Market Share

Force10 Networks today announced that it has expanded its 10 Gigabit Ethernet market share for the sixth consecutive quarter, according to Dell'Oro Group's most recent Ethernet switch survey. Force10 is the only vendor to show continued market share expansion over the period. According to Dell'Oro Group, Force10 was also the second largest modular 10 Gigabit Ethernet vendor in the industry for the fourth quarter of 2005, marking the second consecutive quarter Force10 held the position. Over the last two quarters, driven by rapid customer growth, Force10 increased its 10 Gigabit Ethernet sales by more than 70 percent on port shipments that grew 118 percent. "Force10 was a primary beneficiary as the growing need for reliable, high speed networks within enterprises created a rapid acceleration in the 10 Gigabit Ethernet market," said Andrew Feldman, vice president of marketing for Force10 Networks. "Force10's extensive presence in the early adopter 10 Gigabit Ethernet market successfully positioned the TeraScale E-Series as enterprises increasingly required similar performance, reliability and functionality characteristics." Force10's history with the research and education communities is evidenced in the most recent edition of the Top500.org list, in which the TeraScale E-Series powers the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Sandia National Laboratories -- two of the world's ten fastest supercomputers. Additionally, CERN recently deployed the Force10 TeraScale E-Series in Europe's largest 10 Gigabit Ethernet network to connect computing resources and experiments throughout the Geneva-based campus. Recent deployments of the Force10 TeraScale E-Series at SEGA Corp. and Sun Microsystems' Sun Grid Compute Utility show the movement of 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology into new markets. To drive down the price of 10 Gigabit Ethernet and simplify the total cost of network ownership, Force10 introduced the industry's only 16-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet card, increasing the density of the TeraScale E-Series to 224 ports. In addition to industry-leading 10 Gigabit Ethernet density, the Force10 TeraScale E-Series also supports 1,260 Gigabit Ethernet ports, setting a new standard for the industry. According to Dell'Oro Group, the 10 Gigabit Ethernet market will more than double in 2006 to $1.8 billion. By 2009, the 10 Gigabit Ethernet market is expected to reach $3.3 billion. The rapid growth in the market reflects the increasing adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology outside of research and education communities. As 10 Gigabit Ethernet port prices have continued to fall more in line with Gigabit Ethernet, enterprises are increasingly turning to the higher speed technology to replace aggregated links. Additionally, several other trends, data center consolidation, increasing network traffic, the rise of clustering architectures and virtualization of applications, are driving the need for reliable high performance networks.