Autumn 2018 Optical Connections Magazine

ANTONY SAVVAS THE ARTOF NOISE

With the majority of enterprises now moving towards public cloud and/or hybrid cloud strategies, increasing demands are being put on shared data centres to drive industry requirements.

data centres and across our core, at an accessible price point.”

globe and collect data from every facet of life across the world. The hyperscalers have driven a lot of innovation, and now many other companies of all sizes are bringing this innovation to enterprises, service providers and others.” John Mein, vice president at optical solutions vendor Dust Photonics had his own specific take on innovation at the event, saying, “It’s the ever-increasing speeds that data centres are implementing, going from 10 gigabits to 40 gigabit, to 100, to 400, eventually to 800. The downside is that copper, the foundation of Ethernet cables, is running out of steam. Copper just cannot switch fast enough, and so more and more data centres are putting fibre optic cable everywhere, and as part of that they’re switching from multi-mode fibre to single-mode fibre, for a couple of reasons.” He points out, “Single-mode fibre goes a further distance, whereas multi-mode fibre only goes 100 metres. And single-mode fibre is much less expensive than multi-mode fibre. In fact, single-mode fibre is cheaper per foot than dental floss.” But aren’t there obstacles to using single- mode fibre, like connectivity problems? Not anything that can’t be overcome, says Mein. “A move to silicon-based photonics for single-mode fibre has been a promise for quite some time, but it really hasn’t seen reality because there’s an alignment issue of connecting the fibre to the silicon photonics chip, or the laser, or the photodetector. It’s harder for single-mode fibre because the diameter of the active area of a single-mode fibre is only eight microns. For multi-mode fibre, it’s 40 microns, so the alignment is much easier than single-mode fibre.” But, he says, companies like his have solved that problem and can bring silicon photonics into their next-generation products. “We will use the technology we’ve already developed for multi-mode fibre and passive alignment, and apply it to single-mode fibre.” Thereby bringing single-mode fibre into more data centre applications and reducing costs, he promises. Challenges facing the signal processing and data transport industries will probably

services without compromising network performance and reliability.” Building the best network in the right way can be somewhat of a grey area for many in the industry. Often, companies implement stop-gap measures to fix current issues as part of the immediate lower-cost option. This is instead of investing in quality pieces of infrastructure which ensure continued operation and system longevity. As a result, organisations remain in a state of disrepair, continually only fixing what is technically broken, as opposed to planning for the future. Similarly, many of the new solutions on the market today claim to address certain connectivity challenges, however, they can potentially introduce new problems for the operator.

FINE TUNING THE ECONOMICS Bikash Koley, chief technology officer at Juniper Networks, says his firm is doing its bit to help the industry stay ahead of the

curve. He says, “The impending wave of network traffic is coming from all angles

and affecting all industries.

Success will be about not only equipping the network with the right technology to handle the traffic in a secure way, but also fine-tuning the economics so it makes good business sense. We’re putting a stake in the ground in leading our customers’ transition to 400GbE network capacity with a comprehensive set of solutions to enable our customers to economically usher in the next era of connectivity.” The company recently announced a broad 400GbE refresh to its wide-area network, data centre and enterprise portfolio with advanced routing and switching densities, designed to help customers ‘recalibrate network economics’ as they transition to 400GbE and lower cost-per-bit. THE DATA CENTRE AND ADVANCES IN PHOTONICS With the majority of enterprises now moving towards public cloud and/or hybrid cloud strategies, increasing demands are being put on shared data centres to drive industry requirements. So, what are we seeing in optical advancements here? NetEvents IT symposium in San Jose, attended by Optical Connections. Rajesh Ghai, research director for telecoms network infrastructure at analyst house IDC, said at the event, “The advances in data centre technologies have essentially come from hyperscalers like Google and Facebook. If you think about Google’s technology, yes, the search algorithm is very important, but what drives that technology is the ability to build data centres that span the entire Advancements in data centre photonics were discussed recently at the

BETTER THANDARK FIBRE One operator that thinks it is going

some way to addressing the issues is SSE Enterprise Telecoms. It is implementing a platform to provide ‘limitless scope for high-capacity connectivity across the UK’, its biggest network technology investment

to date. SSE is deploying Infinera’s XTM Series solution to deliver the low latency, flexibility and improved scalability that today’s businesses are

seeking in order to fully future-proof their organisations. “We will offer a resilient, ‘dark fibre-like’ network on a scale never seen before in the UK, and this comes in the wake of a gap in high-capacity connectivity nationwide,” says SSE. The operator says it chose to partner with Infinera due to its combination of layer 1 and 2 packet optical and Ethernet services, serving as a ‘credible alternative’ to the laying of costly dark fibre cabling. Infinera’s synchronisation capabilities allow for flexibility on the network, ‘not currently available at such scale or accessible price point’, it adds. The revamped network promises access to multiple services with much faster speeds of up to 100 gigabits per second to each exchange run by BT, the national backbone network the UK still largely relies on. Conrad Mallon, chief technical architect at SSE Enterprise Telecoms, says, “A network project on this scale makes us one of the few providers that can offer multiples of 100Gbps services between exchanges, commercial

never go away, as the technology constantly evolves to deliver better

performances demanded by applications and their users, but there are signs that key players are beginning to at least keep up with the curve.

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| ISSUE 14 | Q3 2018

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