What is data center interconnect?

Modern life relies on data centers. Hidden from most, these physical facilities are the backbone of the internet, storing and computing information for every industry, enabling data backup and recovery, business continuity plans, cloud-based services and applications. From emails to entertainment streaming, our daily lives are built on data centers. But data centers are not “islands.” They need to be interconnected to share or back up data or to balance workloads. The success of the applications running over them depends not only on the performance of the data centers themselves but also on the connectivity between them. This is what the industry calls data center interconnect or DCI.

DWDM enables multiple signals to be combined and transmitted at different wavelengths on the same fiber pair, facilitating the transparent transport of multiple Terabits of data. Now, to tackle soaring data demand, enterprises and carriers have gone a step further and adopted coherent transport technology. Flexible and programmable coherent interfaces enable the maximum capacity-reach wavelength performance over any type of network infrastructure, leading to the lowest cost per bit. Other key factors besides system capacity are simplicity of network design as well as operational simplicity. Enterprises and carriers must be able to deploy and manage DCI networks with as little complexity and effort as possible. Other parameters like latency also play a vital role, particularly for enterprise DCI applications such as trading and business continuity between sites.

DCI networks are diverse. Data centers can be close to each other or thousands of kilometers away. The number, type and speed of services that must be transported also varies. That’s why DCI solutions need to be tailormade to address customer requirements while also being flexible and futureproof. Our FSP 3000 is an open, scalable and compact DWDM platform that meets all DCI demands, whether for short or long interconnects, over single-span or multi-haul meshed networks, for high-capacity cloud-based applications or SAN DCI for data recovery and business continuity plans. With its modular approach, our FSP 3000 supports multiple types of terminals and OLS components, including components specifically engineered to meet specific DCI application demands, such as SAN DCI or 400ZR DCI. It features an open and disaggregated hardware architecture as well as open, standardized APIs to support automated procedures and seamless integration into SDN and data center environments. With our FSP 3000, ICPs, cloud service providers, carriers and enterprises have a clear route to best-of-breed DCI solutions.