NEW YORK — Infiniband, Fibre Channel, and Ethernet will all see incumbent technologies give way to faster versions in 2014, according to a new report from Crehan Research.

This year more than 50% of Infiniband shipments will have the 56 Gbit FDR version, overtaking 40 G QDR, according to Crehan's Data Center Switch Long-Range Forecast report. Similarly in Fibre Channel, 16 G will surpass 8 G, and in Ethernet 10 G will overtake Gigabit links to make up more than half of all shipments, the report said.

"A surge in investments in data center technologies recently," is one of several factors driving the changes, said Seamus Crehan, president of market research company, speaking in an interview with EE Times.

In addition, the three technologies "are now at a stage where they are relatively mature enough and their pricing is attractive enough that they are often more attractive options than the older incumbent technologies [and] technologies with increased bandwidth are needed to handle ubiquitous connectivity and much richer features," he said.

"These three technologies are not on the same cycle... It just worked out that all three are going to surpass this major milestone in 2014," he added.

"10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) is finally on the verge of becoming the most popular data center switch port connection, after a long and sometimes rocky adoption curve," Crehan said in a statement . "And as 40GbE starts to ramp, we are still forecasting its adoption curve to look much better than that of 10GbE," he added.

Growth in datacenter switching has outpaced other markets, such as servers, storage, and enterprise networking. That's because "the data center is the driver of the business," in many cases, he said, citing examples such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft.

Crehan predicted the $10 billion total market for network switches in 2014 will reach $16 billion by 2018 with a compound annual growth rate slightly under 10%.