In this blog, ETU-LINK will explain the development direction of optical interconnection of data center in the future from three aspects: geographical location distribution, bandwidth demand and optical module of data center.

The construction of data center needs to occupy a relatively large land area, and the current price of land remains high, especially in some more developed cities, so the interconnection of large bandwidth is very important. At present, the products of high-speed optical interconnection include 100 Gigabit / 40 Gigabit optical module, 100 Gigabit / 40 Gigabit DAC high-speed cable, 100 Gigabit / 40 Gigabit AOC active optical cable, etc. these products can upgrade the existing data bandwidth.

Back to the key factor of land price, the cost of building a large data center in a big city is obviously too high. Therefore, the data center will be built in the suburbs or remote areas. At this time, it is necessary to choose long-distance optical interconnection products. Combined with the above high bandwidth and long-distance purchase factors, 100 Gigabit / 40 Gigabit LR4 optical module and 100 Gigabit / 40 Gigabit ER4 optical module are good choices.

Data center areas are usually located near metropolitan areas with high population density in order to provide the best service (about latency and availability) to the end customers closest to these areas. The regional architecture is slightly different between CSPs, but consists of redundant regional "gateways" or "hubs" connected to the CSP's wide area network (WAN) backbone (and edge sites that may be used for peer-to-peer, local content transmission or undersea transmission). Each regional gateway is connected to each data center in the region, and the computing / storage server and support structure reside in these data centers.

For equipment interconnection in the data center, transmission cables with high cost performance can be selected for transmission, which will be more economical, such as 100 Gigabit / 40 Gigabit DAC high-speed cable and 100 Gigabit / 40 Gigabit AOC active optical cable. 100 Gigabit / 40 Gigabit optical interconnection products are now popular, but they still can not meet the transmission demand of large bandwidth in the data center. Therefore, the leading optical module manufacturers have launched 200 Gigabit and 400 Gigabit optical modules, and their prices are also very high. For large data centers, the current commercial cost is relatively high. Now the popular silicon photonics has become the core technology to reduce the cost of optical modules in high-speed data centers. Finally, the development direction of optical interconnection products in data center focuses more on high rate and small volume.