Traffic between data centers (DCI traffic) is growing faster than the other categories of traffic. This rapid growth is fueled by the increase in content distribution networks, the proliferation of cloud services and the need to move data between clouds and to the edge. There’s an ever-growing volume of data that must be replicated across different data centers which puts pressure on DCI networks to be flexible, resilient and adapt quickly to changing bandwidth demands.
As internet traffic, connected devices and cloud-based services proliferate, there is a corresponding increase in the deployment of optical fiber. This article will highlight the key market segments and technology enablers driving demand and then discuss the ways that optical fiber technology is being deployed to meet the demands for higher bandwidth, low latency networks.
The Data center interconnect (DCI), has been a primary driver for optical-fiber and fiber-optic cable manufacturers to develop products containing thousands of fibers. We refer to cables with 1728 or more fibers as ultra-high-density cables, and this article examines those products, gathering opinions from several industry experts.
Hyperscale and large cloud data centers tend to be early adopters that shape the industry, with their practices ultimately becoming the standard for data center design and deployment. Current connectivity trends within these spaces are supporting the need to quickly and cost-effectively ramp up capacity in response to emerging technologies and the demand for high-speed, low-latency performance in the evolving digital economy and COVID-19 world.
Edge computing sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence, the internet of things and big data and provides the flexibility of a hybrid model that can take advantage of both data center infrastructure and the cloud. By 2025, experts expect there will be 41.6 billion IoT devices, each equipped with sensors gathering information each second. It’s simply not reasonable for all that data to be streamed back to a central data center or traditional on-premises computing environment. By bringing compute power to the edge and integrating increasingly mature AI — a combination referred to as the “intelligent edge” — agencies can actually use this rapid expansion of data to help their missions.
Corning’s EDGE™ solutions were the industry’s first preterminated optical cabling systems specifically designed for the data center environment.
Color-coded cables to make the installation, management and maintenance of fiber and other cables in the data center easier. Different colors are used on the cable’s outer jacket, inner jacket and connector and can help distinguish fiber grades, identify fiber patch cords, separate ports and differentiate connector boots.
SFP28 stands for Small Form-Factor Pluggable 28. It is the third generation of the SFP interconnect systems designed for 25G performance per the IEEE 802.3by specification (25GBASE-CR). It has the same common form factor as the SFP+, and supports 25Gbps electrical interfaces per channel, making it a cost-effective way to connect within racks and across adjascent racks. It has the characteristics of low power consumption, small volume and high speed, which is beneficial to increase capacity of data center, improve port density and reduce power consumption.
The changing global market conditions have intensified the need for colocation and external data center services.
The future of data centers will rely on cloud, hyperconverged infrastructure and more powerful devices.
