Fujitsu is working with Intel on the use of Silicon Photonics to develop next-generation technology for the data centre, which increase the throughput of system data by a 50-fold factor and reduce system latency. Today, typical server configurations tend to overprovision functionality and underutilise resources, it says. Fujitsu Silicon Photonics-based systems – expected to be commercially available within the next 12 months – will offer a new way to build and operate data centres.
Such a performance increase opens up new horizons and opportunities in using large-scale data sets. It will also radically change data centre design in favour of dynamic resource pools, where users are able to access the computing, processing, network and storage capabilities in line with their exact application needs. Individual components will be disaggregated, since Silicon Photonics can transfer data over distances up to 300 meters without any perceptible impact on performance.
The ability to remove system performance bottlenecks that hamper today’s data centres is especially compelling when handling large-scale volumes of data, running into Petabytes. By replacing traditional connections between data centre components with light (photonics)-based interconnects, data can be moved through running systems up to 50x faster than today’s state-of-the-art 16GB Fiber Channel technology. Resource pools can be optimised independently to achieve the optimum combination of performance, density, energy efficiency and cost.
The provision of this almost limitless bandwidth enables the optimised use of server resources in combination with direct access to Storage Class Memory connected to different server nodes via Silicon Photonics interconnects. This will provide huge performance benefits in all data intensive environments, such as cluster solutions and in-memory databases. Our vision is to have no dedicated storage, just large, redundant and highly available SCM pools which can be addressed by CPU loads with Store Operations.
Jens-Peter Seick, Senior Vice President, Product Development Group, Fujitsu: “Quite simply, the introduction of Silicon Photonics-based technology means that businesses can be confident that their ICT departments will be able to service bigger, better, faster and more needs than ever before. As a result, Fujitsu envisages that the data centre of the future will become much more of a technology enabler for business velocity. The introduction of disruptive technology such as Silicon Photonics-based systems creates new opportunities for environments where the ability to process large volumes of data has, until now, been a major bottleneck.”