What are the requirements for optical modules in the development trend of cloud data centers?

In recent years, the traffic and bandwidth of the data center have grown exponentially, and the data center has gradually transitioned from 10G, 40G to 100G networks, which has driven the application of 100G optical modules in the data center. Optical module, as a photoelectric converter, is an extremely important part of optical fiber communication.

Optical fiber communication is widely used in data center servers, switches and storage optical fiber networks because of its long transmission distance, anti-interference, saving wiring space and other characteristics.

The diversity of data center interconnection scenarios has given rise to the demand for different types of optical modules. Traditional data centers generally use 1G/10G low-speed optical modules, while cloud data centers mainly use 40G/100G high-speed optical modules. Here are the main requirements of several cloud data centers for optical modules.

1. High speed. Due to the explosive growth of data center traffic, higher rate optical modules are needed to meet the huge traffic transmission demand.

2. Massive demand. The number of optical modules needed by the data center is one order of magnitude larger than that of telecommunications.

3. Low power consumption. Data center switches usually have very dense ports. Low power optical modules can not only save energy, but also alleviate the problem of fast heating of optical modules.

4. Small size, light weight. The high-density interface board of the switch in the data center is to improve the transmission capacity. At the same time, more ports can reduce the deployment of the switch and save computer room resources. Therefore, the data center needs smaller optical modules to match switches with more intensive interface boards.

5. Shorter iteration cycle. The iteration cycle of data center optical modules is generally about 3 years, while that of carrier level optical modules is generally 6-7 years or more.

The optical interconnection products commonly used in data centers are different due to different terminal equipment. Servers generally use DAC high-speed cables or AOC active optical cables, while switches generally use optical modules together with optical jumpers.