The technological breakthroughs in 100G optical products continuously meet the needs of ultra large scale data centers. The development of 5G has enabled many industries to achieve high data throughput and low latency. Since 2017, many companies have upgraded to 100G data center networks and are now pursuing 400G/800G networks. Meanwhile, other small data centers have gradually upgraded to 100G.
What drives the growth of 100G data center networks?
The latest report from Dell’Oro Group shows that the 100G Ethernet market is still hot, and in the future, the shipment volume of 100G data center switches will continue to grow by more than half. Currently, the shipment volume of 100G port devices is showing a hot trend. However, according to analysts from Dell’Oro Group, the shipment volume of 400G port devices is expected to continue to grow.
Dell’Oro predicts that by 2024, ports of 400G and above will account for over 25% of shipments, and the development of 800G will also rapidly rise. Dell’Oro Senior Director Sameh Boujelbene said, “Optics will continue to play an important role in the data center switch market. The availability of high-capacity, low-cost optical devices is crucial for driving any rate transition.” In addition, HPC driven workloads will continue to drive data center network infrastructure, and the cost of high-speed port devices will gradually decrease.
Under the influence of this market environment, enterprises using 10G/25G/40G data center networks have also begun to move towards 100G data center networks. Why do companies need to upgrade to faster networks?
100G Data Center Network Architecture and Traffic Changes
Currently, 10G and 40G networks are still widely used. But for data centers, this is far from keeping up with the growth of data scale and traffic, especially Internet service providers and cloud service platforms. The data center must be upgraded to a higher bandwidth data transmission solution to avoid network problems caused by low rates and high latency. This is also one of the reasons why 100G data centers have become mainstream in the market.
Limitations of 10G/25G/40G enterprise networks
In traditional data centers, link aggregation can easily lead to load imbalance. Compared with 100G/200G/400G networks, 10G/25G/40G backbone networks have lower bandwidth efficiency and cannot continuously meet data transmission needs. In addition, with the continuous expansion of the scale of modern enterprises, the Internet has become more and more complex, and the requirements for bandwidth will be higher and higher. A 100G data center network can compensate for the limitations of low-speed networks, optimize link aggregation, and improve overall efficiency. In order to meet the needs of future business development, upgrading the network will be an inevitable choice.
CMOS technology helps with network upgrades
High speed optical modules are often expensive and have high power consumption in the early stages of development, but with the continuous maturity of optical module technology, the cost-effectiveness will be greatly improved. Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology can provide up to 10 times transmission speed for 100G network architectures while reducing power consumption by 50%. The development of this Ethernet technology enables 100G port devices to achieve low power consumption and high bandwidth performance, while reducing the cost of 100G data center networks. With the exponential growth of Internet data and the continuous maturity of optical module technology, 400G/800G will also occupy a larger market in the future.
100G Data Center Network Development
The increase in processor power, server and virtualization density is accelerating the uplink speed of switches. The traffic between servers also exceeds the traffic volume from clients to servers. In order to process data more effectively, the data center network must be upgraded from 10G to 100G.
