At the heart of global connectivity, data centers provide storage, processing, and servers but connectivity is of the essence, demanding high quality throughput, the ability to move traffic between clouds and company edges, and security
Spanning the data center core to network edge, infrastructure networks race to address ambitious targets boosted by AI demand in data accessibility and in speed, while aiming for temperature control and power consumption
Fiber optic network technology, deeply embedded in infrastructure for connectivity within data centers and between data centers, are rising up to the challenge
At the heart of technological advance, silicon photonics combine the silicon integrated circuit and the semiconductor laser to enable faster data transfer, inviting deeper specialization aimed at
- temperature control to avoid overheating,
- speed in global communication across many GPUs,
- interconnectivity between one GPU and the other GPUs by optical connection, potentially at the chip level to maximize efficiency with optical input/output (I/O)
To address the novel performance requirements of AI models, some companies engage in specializations, while others favor vertical integration to enable high data-rate transmission between servers, switches, and routers in the network
The selected equities mirror the divide between very large, fully integrated industry actors, such as Broadcom, Intel or Cisco, dominant in semi-conductors as well as data communications, fiber glass experts (Corning) or cable giants (Prysmian) and niche specialists, providing optical communication components (Fabrinet or Coherent) or critical hyperconvergence solutions (Nutanix, Broadcom-VMware as well as IBM, HPE, Dell and others)
Hyperconvergence is a global trend and is defined by one of the vendors (Nutanix) as distributed infrastructure platform with intelligent software to create flexible building blocks that replace legacy infrastructure consisting of separate servers, storage networks, and storage arrays
With extreme performance and volatility, Applied Optoelectronics
This theme complements recently published
Follow-up themes to be published shortly are
- Cloud - Data Architecture Applications
- Data - Enterprise Platforms