Special vs Custom vs Standard? Choosing the Building Blocks-9
Continuing from last week, let us understand what the web-scale guys have been pushing to make a great change in the way the networks are being built. But before we go there let us also understand their area of interest.
As the communication networks evolve, we will have just two types of connections in real sense.
- User to Cloud
- Cloud to Cloud
The user to cloud segment is being served by the operators, who provide connections for retail (Mobile as well as home consumers) as well as B2B segment (all sorts of enterprises and governments). This segment is very very widely diversified, needs a lot of physical infra spread over a multitude of locations and is being addressed with a wide variety of networks and technologies, the latest in the game being 5G.
The cloud to cloud segment is the data center interconnect, known as DCI. The web-scale players have first focused on innovation in this space and we see great platforms and products being rolled out by various vendors, drastically reducing the per gig cost for this segment.
While these guys worked on the inter data center connectivity, they have been also solving the intra data center connectivity. They have modernized and simplified hyper scale connectivity using Leaf-Spine switches, re-inventing IP in the process.
Now 90% of the data is being processed within these data centers and the current applications are fine with it. But the trend going forward is Edge- Compute. That means that the data centers have to come closer to the user. Now we cannot have large hyper scale data centers everywhere, so what is the answer?
The answer is a distributed data center, where the leaf spine switches connect these disparate entities into a single large virtual data center. The challenge in this is two folds, the distances outside of the data centers require DWDM Optics and also the fact that fibers are not always easy to get so we need to use DWDM for sharing the physical path.
They are hell bent upon solving both these problems and next week, I will talk about the technologies that they have been pushing, which will soon revolutionize the metro infrastructures.
So stay tuned.