Page 49 - Market Analysis Report of Optical Communications Field in China & Global market 2022

Artificial Intelligence and the Impact on Our Data Centers Technology deployment options in the data center • If you want to extend the life of your installed duplex
This is where fiber plays such a pivotal role in ensuring fiber and don’t mind staying with your preferred hardware
your picture or video of that special (or stupid) moment is vendor without the option of interoperability and again
broadcast to the whole world to see, share, and comment. don’t need longer distances, you select one of the
Fiber has become the de facto transmission media across multimode WDM solutions.
our data center infrastructures thanks to its high speed
and ultra-high-density capabilities compared to its copper Now I’ll tell you what the majority of the tech companies
cousins. As we migrate to higher network speeds, we also who are deploying AI on a massive scale are designing into
introduce a whole new complexity into the mix – which their networks for today and tomorrow … single-mode
technology to adopt? parallel optics. And here are three simple reasons why.

Traditional 3-tier networks used core, aggregate, and edge 1. Cost and distance
switching to connect the different servers within the data The current market trend is that parallel optic solutions
center where inter-server traffic travels in a North-South are developed and released first, with WDM solutions
direction through the active devices to talk with each other. following suit a couple of years later, so volumes in
Now however, and greatly thanks to the high computational parallel are much higher driving a lower manufacturing
requirements and interdependency that AI and ML bring to cost. They also support lesser distances than the 2 km and
the game, more of these networks are implemented using 10 km WDM solutions, so you don’t need as many of the
a 2-tier spine-and-leaf network, where servers talk to each complex components to cool the lasers and multiplex and
other in an East-West direction due to the ultra-low latency demultiplex the signal at either end. And while we’ve seen
demanded by production and training networks. the size and scale of these “hyperscale” facilities explode
into buildings the size of 3-4 football pitches within huge
Since the IEEE-approved of 40G and 100G back in campuses, our own data shows that the average deployed
2010, there have been a number of competing proprietary length over single-mode fiber is yet to exceed 165 m
solutions which have somewhat clouded the judgment of in these facilities, so there is no need to pay for a more
users who are not certain which path to follow. To explain, expensive WDM transceiver to drive a distance that they
before 40G and the others we had SR, or short reach, for don’t need to support.
multimode and LR, or long reach, for single-mode. Both
used a single pair of fibers to transmit a signal between Parallel single-mode also uses less power than a WDM
two devices. It didn’t matter whose equipment you used variant. As we saw from the Google example earlier
or which transceiver was installed in that device, it was a regarding their power usage, anything that can be done to
simple data transaction over two fibers. reduce the single biggest operating cost of a data center has
to be a good thing.
But the IEEE-approved solutions at 40G and beyond,
and its competing brethren changed the game. Now we 2. Flexibility
are looking at either two fibers using standards-approved One of the major advantages of deploying parallel optics is
or proprietary, noninteroperable WDM techniques, and the ability to take a high-speed switch port, say 40G, and
standards-approved, or multisource agreements (MSAs) break that out into 4x10G server ports. Port breakout offers
and engineered techniques for parallel optics using eight great economies of scale because breaking out into lower
fibers (four to transmit and four to receive) or 20 fibers (10 speed ports can significantly reduce the number of chassis
to transmit and 10 to receive). or rack-mount units for the electronics from 3:1 (and data
center real estate is not cheap) and uses less power, which
• If you want to continue with standards-approved solutions requires less cooling so lowers the energy bill further, with
and keep optics costs down because you don’t need the distance our data showing this to equate to a 30 percent savings
capabilities of single-mode fiber, you select multimode parallel on a singlemode solution. The transceiver vendors also
optics which also enables you to break out higher-speed 40 or confirm that a large proportion of all shipped parallel optic
100G switch ports into smaller 10 or 25G server ports. I’ll cover transceivers are deployed to take advantage of this port
this in more detail a little further in this article. breakout capability.

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