Broadcom suddenly dominates 10 Gigabit controllers

Broadcom pointed out at the VMworld 2009 trade show this week that the company now has almost 70% of the market for 10 Gigabit Ethernet controllers, a huge jump, according to the latest Dell’Oro Group numbers.

The data comes from the research firm’s latest quarterly report on network adapters, which covers the second quarter of this year and states that Broadcom holds a 69.3% market share. The closest competitor has 15.7% market share.

Interestingly, Broadcom did not get into this new market until the first quarter of 2008 – and even just last quarter, the company’s market share was down at 44%. Most of the shipments are in servers, as server makers OEM Broadcom’s chips into their offerings.

In fact, it appears to be a pretty big turnaround in a short amount of time. Less than a year ago, the Linley Group was saying that while Broadcom was the dominant vendor in Gigabit Ethernet components, that dominance had not yet carried over into 10 Gigabit Ethernet. 

Broadcom and other vendors are pitching 10 Gigabit Ethernet for virtual environments, because putting more virtual machines on a single system often necessitates that the network connections to that system be fatter. Broadcom also says that its controllers provide hardware acceleration, offload processing and support VMware.

The company is demonstrating its 10 Gigabit Ethernet components at the VMworld show this week in San Francisco, showing Dell PowerEdge servers with Broadcom controllers and claiming that the technology can accelerate network traffic within the VMware hypervisor architecture. Broadcom says it worked closely with VMware to optimize the controllers’ interactions with the virtualization software.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.