Is all-photonics the future of networking?

The flow of data is core to businesses all around the world – how much can be transmitted, and at what speed, is a fundamental aspect of IT systems ranging from cloud computing to the frontier of AI models.

In data centers, the tech sector is focused on reducing latency, improving bandwidth, and reducing energy consumption to improve AI performance and lower operating costs. But achieving these goals by shifting about current technology can only go so far.

Increasingly, firms are looking to cutting-edge technologies and approach such as all-photonics networks, which use photons for all processes including data transfer and storage, rather than electronic components. How close are we to achieving this technology? And how could it benefit every business.

In this episode, Rory is joined Chris Wright, senior vice president global engineering and CTO at Red Hat, to discuss the potential benefits of photonics based networks and how they could upend current network architecture.

Highlights

"[A]s we introduce all photonics networks and this end to end connectivity, extend it into the data center, we're reducing the latency such that it starts to feel much more like it's just another server and another rack in the same data center. We're literally approaching the speed of light in terms of how we transmit signals from end to end and the latency in, say, thousand of kilometers is still measured in a small number of milliseconds in a way that again, it starts to feel like you're very close."

"[T]o really inspire change you need to show something better, not just at a technical level but at some kind of an outcome. Why is this better for a user, for a business? And so while we have a really deep technology focus in the IOWN Global Forum, in order to bring that to life we've always had an interest in thinking about it through the lens of use cases. So the global forum's membership base isn't only the technology providers, the network builders. It includes members who represent different industry focus areas, and that's really been since the beginning."

"Also that low latency, high bandwidth connectivity gives you flexibility in where you actually place data centers. So you could place data centers in areas that are easier to power, easier to cool for example, maybe not in the core of an urban environment, maybe just slightly outside of a city closer to a water source for cooling or as a power source, or closer to to a wind farm or solar farm."

Footnotes

• What is latency?
• Is latency always important?
• The answer to data center sustainability? Industry rallies around light-based networking systems

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