Optical technology proponents have argued for many years that fiber is about to take over all of networking. But, time and time again we have seen copper technologies reinvent themselves to serve at least the last 100 meters in LANs. But with the complicated digital signal processing that is needed to enable the 100-meter operation of copper comes a cost – power consumption. And in data center operations, power consumption may be the single most important issue still needing to be solved.
Before the EPA performed their study on data center power consumption and before the creation of the Green Grid, data center managers were worried more about running out of space than out of power. Now, with complicated electronics and the better utilization of server processing through virtualization, lowering power consumption has become more imperative.
VCSEL-based short-wavelength fiber optic networks may be the answer. As mentioned in a previous post, on a port-by-port basis, 10GBASE-SR devices consume four times less power than 10GBASE-T ones. And when you have thousands of these ports within your data center, the total power consumption adds up quickly. Stay tuned for further quantitative analyses of copper versus fiber in the data center.
Finisar is one of the leading manufacturers of VCSELs, and they sell the short wavelength transceivers to LAN and SAN equipment providers including Brocade, Cisco, QLogic , HP and EMC. While transceivers generally sell at very low margins, they are an essential part of keeping costs down and power consumption low in data center networks.
Contributing Analyst - David Gross.
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