Data centre optics

Port-breakout deployments have become a popular networking tool and are driving the large industry demand for parallel optics transceivers. Today, port breakout is commonly used to operate 40G/100G parallel optics transceivers as four 10G/25G links. Breaking out parallel ports is beneficial for multiple applications, such as building large scale spine-and-leaf networks and enabling today’s high-density 10/25G networks. The latter task is the focus of this article.

The Consortium for On-Board Optics (COBO) is looking to change networking equipment permanently. Andy Extance finds out why

Warehouse-scale data centres are stretching the limits of current networking technologies. Dr Ioannis Tomkos describes how advanced optics can remove performance bottlenecks to enable the data centres of the future

Vendors are developing products that support wavelength multiplexing over multimode fibre, providing an alternative to parallel links. Robert Roe reports

Architects of the largest data centres have set optical engineers a challenge: to create cheaper 100 Gigabit interfaces that span up to 2km. Roy Rubenstein reports