Washington, DC--The Optoelectronics Industry Development Association (OIDA) is co-hosting a workshop during the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exhibition and the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC 2013; www.ofcnfoec.org) on the future system and component requirements for "scale out" data centers. The workshop will discuss, refine, and expand on draft metric reported from an earlier workshop held at OFC/NFOEC 2012.
The data center operators--Google, Facebook, Apple--can't expand data centers indefinitely, because it would drive up the cost, footprint, and power consumption. The largest data centers already each consume 50 to 100 MW--that's megawatts--of power and why they locate them near places like the Columbia River Gorge, to save on the transmission cost of electricity and why optics/photonics are expected to play a huge role in future data center architectures.
Next imagine that the traffic into an operator's data center increases as more people use applications more. This might mean greater need for storage and switching equipment, and more traffic inside the data center. Since the overall warehouse has limitations on growth, the inter- and intra-rack interconnects have to continue to improve, at the same or lower cost.
The problem is that modern data centers don't "scale up" in the way that traditional data centers do. They "scale out." Most of the traffic is "East-West", which means that as the traffic into the data centers increases, the traffic from server to server inside ramps up dramatically. Every server is essentially connected to every other server, and that doesn't scale well. The interconnect needs expand rapidly, and therefore so does the cost and power dissipation, which as we know, has a top limit.
Therefore, it means rethinking the architectures. It may mean that an entire row of racks has to be designed as a unit. It may mean dumbing down the robustness of products, to lower the cost. Can the industry agree to new standards? Can it solve the scaling problem without them?
As if that's not enough, this workshop will consider the market opportunity for the interconnect components. With the big data center operators making sweet profit margins--as much as 25% net profit, or even greater--there has to be something in it for the component suppliers, and their investors. OIDA has commissioned Ovum to take a crack at this, and tell us if it's a big enough opportunity to put money into.
OIDA is co-hosting the workshop with the U.S. National Science Foundation, and NSF's Center for Integrated Access Networks (CIAN), which is led by the University of Arizona (Tucson, AZ). It will be held on March 17 at the same time as OFC 2013, in Anaheim, CA.
SOURCE: OIDA; www.oida.org/home/events/oida_data_center_workshop/