Abstract
Our focus here is on data communications within IT equipment and in IT data centers. Optical communications is not new. Thus the obvious question is likely; why a paper entitled, “Why optical data communications and why now?”. The reasons are twofold. First, optical data communications is more necessary now than it has ever been in the past. It is not excessive to even consider that it will be required in the not too distant future. Second, the advances in the broad field of photonics and optics have brought optical communications nearly to the point that it can finally cross over the threshold to be less expensive than electronic signaling. In this paper we make the case why we must aggressively pursue optics for data communications at all length scales within the data center. The summarization of this paper is that optical communications is inevitable, and we offer reasons why we believe this is true.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
R.G. Beausoleil, J.-H. Ahn, N. Binkert, A. Davis, D. Fattal, M. Fiorentino, N.P. Jouppi, M. McLaren, C.M. Santori, S.M. Spillane, D. Vantrease, Q. Xu, A nanophotonic interconnect for high-performance many-core computation. IEEE LEOS Newslett. 22(3), 15–22 (2008)
Cisco Visual Networking Index—Forecast and Methodology, 2007–2012. Cisco Systems, Inc., White Paper, C11-481360-00, June 2008
Approaching the Zettabyte Era. Cisco Systems, Inc., White Paper, C11-481374-00, June 2008
L. Cohen, S.L. Josselyn, US and Worldwide Server Installed Base 2008–2012 Forecast. IDC, No. 212362, vol. 1, May 2008
The US Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration. http://www.eia.doe.gov/, as of August 2008
The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, 2007 Edition, Interconnects, available from http://www.itrs.net/, 2007
Internet Systems Consortium, Internet Domain Survey. http://www.isc.org/, as of August 2008
J.G. Koomey, Estimating total power consumption by servers in the US and the world (Stanford University, 2007)
K.Lim, P.Ranganathan, J.Chang, C.Patel, T.Mudge, S.Reinhardt, Microblades and megaservers: server architectures for emerging warehouse-computing environments, in 35th International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), Beijing, China, June 2008
N. Yezhkova, R.L. Villars, D. Reinsel, B. Nisbet, B. Woo, L. Conner, Worldwide Disk Storage Systems 2008–2012 Forecast: Content-Centric Customers-Reshaping Market Demand. IDC, No. 212177, vol. 1, May 2008