Fiber optic communication technologies: What's needed for datacenter network operations

What Devices do Data Centers Need?

“…Moore's law helps to continuously drive down the cost and power of long haul transponders while offering new enhanced capabilities such as softdecision error correction codes. Other technologies that help to maximize long-haul fiber link capacities include, (1) WDM multiplexing techniques leaving no guard bands in the optical spectrum in order to maximize the system capacity, (2) Raman amplifiers to improve the optical signal to noise ratio, and (3) large effective area fiber to reduce optical non-linearity [3]. In terms of network control and management, SDN (Software Defined Network) has been demonstrated [2] to significantly improve the overall system utilization and availability through centralized traffic engineering.…”

“…Above the private backend network is a transport backbone, which interconnects datacenter operators to the public Internet through peering so that users can gain access to datacenter services and facilities. It should be emphasized that the private backend backbone network is usually architecturally simple with point-to-point links, but is much larger in capacity compared with the publicly facing backbone network [3].…”

The Emerging Optical Data Center

“…While substantial traffic will continue to flow between users and these data centers across the Internet, an increasing fraction of overall data communication is taking place within the data center [2]. For example, a data center with 100,000+ servers, each capable of 40 Gb/s of bandwidth, would require an internal network with 4 Petabits/sec of aggregate bandwidth to support full-bandwidth communication among all servers.…”

Hardware Requirements for Optical Circuit Switched Data Center Networks

“…This paper identifies hardware requirements for optically circuit-switched data center networks with the goal of achieving nearly the same performance as pure electronic packet switched (EPS) networks. We focus on optical communications inside the data center, complementing earlier work [4] for communications between data centers.…”