ANTONY SAVVAS DATACENTRE CONNECTIVITY
D evelopment and support for the Open Compute Project is helping the industry to cope with changing demands. In addition, on the edge side of the market, growing industry initiatives such as the Kinetic Edge Alliance are also supporting evolving connectivity needs. 400G According to market research from Dell’Oro Group, 400Gbps shipments are forecast to surpass 15 million switch ports by 2023, illustrating the faster connectivity requirements in datacentres. Dell’Oro added though, that while 100Gbps port shipments are expected to peak in 2020, they will still comprise more than 30% of datacentre switch ports during the next five years. “The first wave of 400Gbps switch systems based on 12.8 Tbps chips were introduced in the market in the second half of 2018,” says Sameh Boujelbene, senior director for datacentre and campus Ethernet switch market research at Dell’Oro Group. She adds, “However, we do not expect material adoption of 400Gbps until 2020 due to the lack of high volume, low cost 400Gbps optics. The only cloud service provider that started deploying 400Gbps was Google, opting for 2×200Gbps optics with an earlier time-to-market.” She expected other cloud service providers, like Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft, for instance, to keep deploying 100Gbps and to probably use higher density 100Gbps switch systems based on the 12.8 Tbps chips to lower costs. HYPERSCALE William O’Connell, datacentre cloud manager for Europe at infrastructure specialist CommScope, says, “In recent years we have seen the volume of connectivity within the datacentre increase dramatically, particularly fibre
DATACENTRE CONNECTIVITY JOINING THE EDGE AND THE CENTRE
What is the current state of play in the datacentre when it comes to physical connectivity? Antony Savvas looks at the market arena around both the spread of hyperscale datacentre connectivity through the likes of AWS, Microsoft and Google etc and distributed edge datacentres that will better support 5G, IoT, driverless cars and AI applications.
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| ISSUE 18 | Q3 2019
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