FEATURE : DATA CENTRE OPTICS
HEAD
IN THE CLOUD
HAS THE RISE OF THE DATA CENTRE IMPACTED THE MARKET FOR OPTICAL COMPONENTS?
KEELY PORTWAY W
ith increasing new market entrants, models and technologies appearing at speed, it’s impossible to argue that the
data centre is undergoing significant growth. Some key drivers for this include a growth
in cloud and edge computing, alongside the popularity of streaming and gaming, and the internet of things (IoT). Tis, in turn, is driving a need for new optical solutions to address the issues of increasing bandwidth, lower power and longer reach. It’s not uncommon, in today’s modern data
centre, to see rates of 10Gb/s or higher, which is starting to exceed the capability of electrical interconnects on copper cabling. A greater number of fibre optic modules are required to connect servers, switches and storage, as well as enable new architectures. Physical data centres, filled with tall racks of
electronics surrounded by power cables and cooling equipment, generally store data on large, fast hard drives and servers take requests and move the data using fast switches to access the right hard drives. Routers connect the servers to the internet – and it is this for which speed is critical. Components, switches and routers are chosen for speed, as interconnects need to use the quickest methods available. Tis
16 FiBRE SYSTEMS n Issue 26 n Winter 2020
also enables lower latency, as well as reduced time to find and send the data to the person who requested it.
Power play Because almost four and a half billion people were active internet users globally as of October 2019 – 58 per cent of the global population – data centres need to be reliable in parallel with being fast. Tis means that devices need to be designed with redundancy, backups for storage, and uninterruptible power in mind. Another driving factor in the data centre
market is the emergence of the hyperscale data centre or cloud service provider, which has essentially changed the way that vendors do business. Until recently, the architecture in data centres was specified by the vendors who provided the components and hardware, such as switches and servers. Te growth of the hyperscale data centre
led to a demand for even more efficient and economic solutions, as almost every large cloud service provider has its own, oſten diverging, requirements. Tis, in turn, has put pressure on vendors, meaning that resources need to be distributed among a larger number of products. In 2011 Facebook, Intel and Rackspace, alongside Goldman Sachs and Andy
Bechtolsheim – founder, chief development officer and chairman at Arista – launched the Open Compute Project (OCP) incorporating the Open Compute Project Foundation. Te move came following two years of such
significant growth for Facebook that it had to rethink its infrastructure.
Energy efficient Te social networking giant spent those two years designing what it hoped would be the world’s most energy efficient data centre that could handle unprecedented scale at the lowest possible cost. It was 38 per cent more energy efficient to build and 24 per cent less expensive to run than the company’s previous facilities. Facebook presented its developments to the co-founders of the OCP, whose objectives include promoting the design of efficient data centres. Te first such design is still in place in Prineville, Oregon. Looking to the future, the foundation
has started work to identify and prioritise technologies and projects intending to solve the pain points of the industry, and to further engage with its community of engineers, developers and builders. Bill Carter, CTO at the foundation, said: ‘Beginning last year, the board of directors, technical advisors
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