Cloud services are a shared economy in the IT industry, while data centers are the carriers of these services. Due to limited land resources and equipment room space, data centers are increasingly deployed in a distributed manner, requiring WDM technology to connect them to provide unified services.

Just as steam engines, generators, computers, and the Internet revolutionized society before, new 5G, AI, and cloud-driven technologies are doing the same.

With the rapid development of big data, cloud computing, and mobile Internet, more and more enterprises are opting to build multiple data centers, with the traffic between them steadily increasing.

Data center interconnect (DCI) serves as the foundation of enterprise digital transformation. DCI networks carry increasing amounts of services and require higher reliability.

The networking journey is always one of change. Yet there are some technologies that we’ve used for literally decades that are showing signs of being less than up to the challenges of growing bandwidth and device density. Indeed, new services such as Wi-Fi 6 are driving the need for more bandwidth, especially on the backhaul. Copper Ethernet cables are a great example of where a great technology is beginning to run into the harsh limits of physics. To achieve even 10 Gigabit speeds excessive care has to be taken with thick, less flexible cables and distance limits of 100 meters for properly installed cabling systems (Cat6a or Cat7). With bandwidth rising to 40Gbps and 100Gbps and beyond, it becomes a matter of much discussion on how we support networks going forward, especially in new construction. Nobody wants the expense of upgrading a building’s network cabling within a few years of finishing it.

Expansion of enterprise data centers brings forward the need for high-capacity, high-quality, flexible, and scalable connectivity. Driven by these requirements, enterprises across different verticals are migrating towards self-built and self-managed data center interconnect (DCI).
The needs of enterprises, however, also dictate other features of evolving DCI solutions: simple and automated operations, administration, and management as well as simplification of network architecture.

Physical pipe isolation provides guaranteed bandwidth as well as low data transmission jitter and latency. The time division feature fulfills the environmental requirements of time synchronization. Moreover, the utilization of a clock transmission solution ensures simple and reliable network-wide production network communication.

Over the past decade, data center services have shifted from web-centric to cloud-centric. Today, they are shifting from the era of cloud computing and into the intelligent era.

As we move towards Digital Transformation 2.0, digitalization has become the foundation of enterprise survival, rather than just a means of cost reduction and efficiency improvement. In this era of digitality, data centers have become a source of value creation. According to a report of Equinix, a leading global data carrier, the compound annual growth rate of data center interconnect (DCI) traffic is 51% from 2018 to 2022, projecting a new round of exponential growth for data centers.