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FEATURE: DATA CENTRE OPTICS


Speaking of which… Te upcoming OFC conference and exhibition in San Diego will feature a Data Centre Summit, with keynotes from some of the industry’s best-known thought-leaders. Here, a selection of them offer their views on whether the rise of the data centre has impacted the market for optical components.


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Robert Doverspike, director, network evolution strategies, LLC, USA and OFC general chair


To understand the rapid need for optical components for data centres, some background history is helpful. Te rapid rise of demand for optical fibre and interfaces in data centres is due to three main evolutionary factors:


1. Te basic need for enterprise DCs arises from the explosion of social networking, online sales and advertising, proliferation of web sites, streaming video and online search. Te first factor has been amplified by the emergence of cellular networks and associated personal data devices that enable frequent and ubiquitous high-speed use. 2. To accommodate these needs, the demand for servers has skyrocketed; furthermore, it has become inefficient for most (especially small to medium) enterprise service providers to maintain their own physical server farms and DCs. As a result, DCs have become more centralised through the rise of content distribution networks (CDN) and cloud network/computing services. Cloud services have been further enabled by technologies such as Virtual Machines (VMs) and Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) that allow enterprise customers to carve out flexible and virtual portions of massive server capabilities of cloud providers. 3. As a result, DCs have grown enormously over the past decade, some to the size of small cities and using Gigawats of power. Of note, the amount of data traversing within a data centre, called intra-DC communications, is oſten orders of magnitude larger than the amount of data between them (called inter- DC communications). Such communications have been traditionally transmited over long-distance optical transport technologies. However, because of the massively larger scale and high heat and energy usage,


20 FiBRE SYSTEMS n Issue 26 n Winter 2020


intra-DC communications fibre and optical products must be different than their inter-DC counterparts and rely on customised products to interconnect massive top-of-rack servers. In this context, optical components must achieve the highest bitrates, power/heat efficiencies and large economies of scale. Tese economies can be achieved by customising highly packaged short-reach optical modules. Tese modules are then interconnected by an extremely dense optical fibre backbone. OFC offers a rich variety of valuable


information on data centre business and technology. For example, the Data Centre Summit is a popular update and discussion atended by major data centre technologists and enterprise service providers. Other key examples are the Rump Session ’When Will Co- packaged Optics Replace Pluggable Modules in the Data Centre?’ – six short courses on state- of-the-art data centre technologies, a panel and three workshops on data centre evolution, five invited technical speakers/tutorials on data centre optical technologies, and many individual technical sessions on similar topics.


Karen I Mathews, technology and market development manager for Corning, and moderator of OFC’s Data Centre Summit Keynote: Reducing Power in Network


As in past years, the architecture of data centres will be of high interest to atendees at this year’s OFC conference. Te arrival of the cloud has caused that architecture to evolve. Historically, data centres were built on a network infrastructure that relied on separate racks and large clusters of servers. Today, however, the growth in cloud and


edge computing, video streaming, gaming, new digital services and the internet of things (IoT), not to mention artificial intelligence and machine learning, are fuelling significant growth in the data centre market. Along with this growth comes a need for reduced latency and


time/cost to scale. To address these concerns, network architects began breaking out these large clusters into smaller pods. Having multiple pods also removes the


problem of having a single point of failure in a system. Interconnecting these small pods will require


more optical connectivity and high-bandwidth optics. Te cloud has fuelled data centre growth dramatically, which is leading to significant growth in the optical components necessary to enable future data centres.


Tom G Giallorenzi, senior director, science policy, OSA


Te exponential growth of data centres over the past decade has seen a corresponding growth in server capability, power demands, and data transmission resources. Moving into 2020, companies and users will have an even greater need for nimble, distributed and time-critical data centre resources. Tese demands are already manifesting in the


real-time data needed for autonomous vehicles and the consumer shiſt to HD streaming and other on-demand entertainment services. But can the current design support these demands, while also adapting to the global rollout of 5G? Tese topics will be front and centre at the 2020 OFC conference, which will take an in-depth look at the growing reliance on edge computing, as well as the added resources offered by new opto-electric components that promise greater speed and greater efficiency. Te innovations will be seen both within data


centre and across the networks of optical fibres that will remain the backbone of global data transmission across all distance scales. It is an exciting time and new innovations in optics and photonics will be more important than ever, if we want to continue to push the limits of data storage and transmission. n


www.fibre-systems.com @fibresystemsmag


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