“Data Center Interconnect”
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Just as steam engines, generators, computers, and the Internet revolutionized society before, new 5G, AI, and cloud-driven technologies are doing the same.
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.
Data center interconnect (DCI) serves as the foundation of enterprise digital transformation. DCI networks carry increasing amounts of services and require higher reliability.
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.
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.
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.
According to the Global Interconnection Index released by Equinix, the DCI bandwidth capacity is expected to reach 13,300 Tbit/s in 2022, with a compound annual growth rate of 51%. This will be essential, as the government, finance, telecommunications, and other industries are increasingly dependent on the digital service ecosystem, driving demand for higher interconnection bandwidths.
Data center interconnect (DCI) solutions have taken the optical transport market by storm, driven by webscale and Internet content providers' bandwidth demands. As customer demands on DCI solutions evolve, the design of these compact modular systems needs to evolve as well.
Automobiles have been around for more than a century. In the early days, it took 728 man-hours to assemble just one automobile, making it impossible to meet the market demand. After Ford invented the assembly line, that time was shortened to a mere 90 minutes. With such improved efficiency, the go-to-market (GTM) time of automobiles was greatly shortened and the assembly cost was reduced, making it possible for almost every home to have an automobile.
