Why self-built data centre interconnect is the way forward for web-scale business

The world is witnessing massive growth in data centre investments as organisations strive to build environments that have the capacity necessary to handle modern requirements.

At the same time, global Internet traffic has exploded, with Huawei’s Global Industry Vision predicting that the amount of data produced annually will reach 180 ZB in 2025. Most of that traffic passes through a data centre at some point.

Add to this the emerging need to feed large volumes of data to ever-hungry AI based systems, and the importance of the underlying data centre and networking architecture become clear. Indeed, Huawei’s Global Industry Vision suggests 97% of large enterprises intend to use AI by 2025, and it will form a primary component of their digitalisation strategies.

Building appropriate networking and data centre infrastructure means not just considering the ability to handle today’s business-as-usual workloads and anticipated spikes caused by major events, but to also handle long term growth and the ability to cater for unexpected needs such as those caused by COVID-19.

The benefits of custom-built DCI

The need to connect data centre assets in a fast, reliable, and cost-effective manner is a growing consideration when planning computing environments. In this new world, factors such as throughput and latency are critical, but so are simplified operations and maintenance, intelligence, and security.

As a result, Data Centre Interconnect (DCI) technology is becoming increasingly important, due to its ability to boost inter-data centre bandwidth, reduce latency, and eliminate packet loss, leading to an overall better experience.

As DCI technology gains strategic importance for large enterprises, many are taking the step of owning and controlling their own DCI infrastructure to handle current and future traffic needs. This is proving most common among larger web companies, but also increasingly for large utilities, telecommunications, financial services, and government entities that are both highly digitalised and have distributed data centre architecture. Controlling the DCI ensures that the organisation oversees decisions regarding bandwidth availability, and it can also manage the entire security profile rather than relying on a third party.

Taking ownership of the DCI allows an organisation to take advantage of the benefits of self-control with the ability to utilise fit-for-purpose protocols and architectures to better manage throughput, latency, and security.

The OptiXtrans DC908 advantage

Huawei’s offering in the DCI market is the Huawei OptiXtrans DC908, a high-density, optical-electrical integrated design that offers up to 88 Tbps capacity per fibre, with flexible configuration of 100G to 800G per wavelength – sufficient for the next 10 years – and 6.4 Tbps per rack unit.

What also makes the Huawei OptiXtrans DC908 stand apart from its competition, however, is the AI-ready operations and maintenance capability for fibre fault prediction and quick and accurate troubleshooting. Huawei OptiXtrans DC908 is designed to reduce costs and enable rapid provisioning, including the ability to deploy from scratch in 8 minutes with automatic one-click deployment, eliminating the need for optical-layer fibre connection, configuration, and commissioning. The Huawei OptiXtrans DC908 also features automated sensing and automated optimisation of traffic models.

All of these factors served to catch the eyes of the judges at Interop Tokyo 2020, which awarded the Huawei OptiXtrans DC908 the Best of Show Award.

Huawei’s DCI technology has become a key component in the success of Chinese online giant Baidu and has enabled the company to scale up its services effortlessly when required.

Summary

Data centres are the backbone of enterprise IT. The performance of the applications and services that organisations and their customers rely on can be immediately linked back to the decisions made regarding the hardware and networking services they run on.

It is vital therefore that designers make the right decisions when it comes to the selection of data centre interconnect technology, to ensure that it can meet the needs of both today’s workloads and those of the future.

Click here for more information about Huawei OptiXtrans DC908.

Click here for more information about Huawei DCI solution.

Click here for more information about Interop Tokyo 2020.