Accelerate DCI: Serverius Upgrades with the Huawei DC OptiX Solution

The Netherlands sits as the European starting point of the huge New Eurasian Land Bridge, which connects Europe with Asia. The country is well connected in other ways, too.

Indeed, already home to a well-developed renewable energy industry that's a source of stable power supply, the country has long been at the forefront of global development: as a historically important trading nation, it created the very first stock market in the seventeenth century, for example. And as the world enters the Fourth Industrial Revolution — Industry 4.0 — through intelligent computing and big data, the Netherlands has put its resources to good use, upgrading its entire cloud computing industry to place renewed focus on data center construction and operations.

Today, the Netherlands is one of the backbone network nodes of Europe, with plenty of submarine cable and connectivity resources. And as technology giants increase investment in data centers, a third of all of Europe's are located in and around Amsterdam, turning the nation into one of the most advanced data center markets in the world.

Not surprisingly, such an advanced market acts as a breeding ground for data center service providers. Serverius is the largest Dutch all-in-one Information Technology (IT) infrastructure supplier, operating three data centers and providing European backbone network interconnection between Amsterdam and the central German city of Frankfurt. It offers data center services — such as hosting, connection, and network security — for over 2000 large global enterprises, and has won the trust of many large Internet and cloud providers through its quality of service.

In the intelligent era, rapid access to data is critical, of course: Artificial Intelligence (AI) models require up-to-date data to be able to adapt to rapidly changing business conditions. Conversely, outdated data can adversely affect the value of an AI model, making it critical to keep data online and flowing smoothly across data centers. The rapid pace of technological development today is now seeing customers place ever higher requirements on data center infrastructure, especially in terms of Data Center Interconnect (DCI). Indeed, a large number of 100G interfaces have already been widely deployed on DCI networks, and even 400G transmission requirements are emerging. The legacy Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM)-based DCI network system of Serverius used Dispersion Compensation Module (DCM) optical transmission technology, designed for the single-wavelength 10G era. Clearly, such technology is unable to meet the surging traffic bearing requirements of today, let alone tomorrow.

Yet, while DCI evolution is critical to data center service development, ensuring service continuity and protecting existing network investments are just as important. Serverius needed a smooth evolution solution to transform its legacy network into a future-oriented DCI network, one able to meet the service development requirements of the next decade while minimizing the impact on existing services.

A strategic partner of Serverius, Huawei provided its DC OptiX Solution — based on Huawei OptiXtrans DC908 — meeting the company's DCI network upgrade requirements and bringing greater value to the company overall. The DC OptiX Solution is compatible with the company's legacy DCM network, providing a single-wavelength 200G to 800G DCI large-bandwidth solution. This solution avoids the need to lease new optical fibers and supports the rapid upgrade of DCI optical-layer capabilities on the live network, minimizing the impact on it. And upon completion, based on Super C band technology, single-fiber capacity is now able to reach a maximum of 48 Tbit/s, with the capability of evolving to a maximum of 88 Tbit/s.

Currently, the first batch of Huawei OptiXtrans DC908s has been deployed in two core data centers, Dronten and Meppel, tripling the DCI capacity between them. On top of helping Serverius quickly increase its DCI capacity and implement future-oriented DCI capacity reconstruction based on live network conditions, the DC OptiX Solution also brings higher value to Serverius and improves the overall competitiveness of its Internet Data Center (IDC) services.

Reduced data center space, power consumption, and Operating Expenditure (OPEX): The 6.4 Tbit/s/U, highly integrated, box-shaped DCI platform cuts 70% from the physical footprint, compared with traditional solutions, freeing valuable equipment room resources for revenue-generating computing and storage cabinets.

Easy installation and delivery, with efficiency improved by intelligent Operations and Maintenance (O&M): One click auto-commissioning enables service provisioning within just 8 minutes. In the circumstances facing today's world, this reduces the need for site visits from the vendor and reduces contact time, critical during the pandemic. The fiber fault prediction function of iMaster NCE — Huawei's network automation and intelligence platform — is able to learn the sub-health status of fibers several weeks in advance, proactively avoiding losses caused by fiber faults. The co-bundling fiber-cable detection function intelligently detects when working and protection fibers are deployed on the same route or cable. This function is ideal for scenarios where leased fibers are used to configure redundancy protection, avoiding excessive investment in protection. Meanwhile, the accurate troubleshooting function reduces noise alarms by more than 95% and quickly locates their root cause. These intelligent functions help O&M engineers with their work and improve the reliability of the entire DCI system.

Secure data transmission: L1 data is encrypted using AES-256. This ensures data transmission security between data centers, providing secure and confidential bank data transmission, for example.

"We have made encouraging progress working with Huawei, and this is underlined by our goal to make the web fast and more secure. Huawei OptiXtrans DC908 embodies the company's design concept. To deliver a much-needed bandwidth upgrade, Huawei proposed a reconstruction solution that is compatible with the existing optical layer, following in-depth analysis of the live DCI network. This solution not only upgrades bandwidth, but also cuts optical fiber investment, avoiding the need to manage multiple DCI systems. Huawei OptiXtrans DC908 provides a future-oriented, fast, and smooth ultra-broadband solution. The automatic and intelligent design also enables easy deployment and service agility.

— Sergey Petukhin, Head of Connectivity Infrastructure, Serverius

Strategically located in what was once one of the world's major trading nations, today Dutch pioneer Serverius trades in digital assets, reshaping the data center industry powered by the DC OptiX Solution with Huawei OptiXtrans DC908.