In the fast-evolving realm of webscale services, innovation sets the pace, and the tempo is only accelerating. As the horizon of cloud computing extends to the far edge of the network, an important shift is underway across industries as disparate as manufacturing, mining and healthcare. The tech trifecta of AI, IoT and digital twins is launching a new industrial revolution where automation and innovation are poised to transform our lives.
In this metamorphosis, the network is not just a passive follower, it will lead the dance. For webscale operators seeking continued dominance in the age of automation, the mandate is clear: innovate from end to end, including your networks. Beyond the traditional realms of compute and storage, the spotlight is now on data center interconnect and the integration of wide area optics and routing with agile and resilient data center fabrics. It's not just about pushing the boundaries; it's about redefining them.
Reframing the optics
In the business of accelerating the movement of bits and bytes, optical networking has long been pivotal. Key innovations in areas like dense-wave-division multiplexing (DWDM) and coherent communications drove the evolution of high-capacity, long-haul communications in the late 2000s and 2010s — laying the foundation for today’s cloud.
While these technologies have been essential to the cloud age, they are reaching natural bounds, like the Shannon Limit, where further increases in spectral efficiency only result in unacceptable error probability. It will take new thinking and creative approaches to change the game. According to Shannon, the capacity of any information channel is subject to three parameters: spectral efficiency, spectrum use and advances in optical fiber’s carrying capacity. We will require innovations in all three areas to meet the needs of tomorrow’s cloud.
Innovations in super-coherent technologies are a good example of how we can still improve spectral efficiency. With their ultra-high baud rates, advanced modulation formats and more powerful digital signal processors (DSPs), they not only allow for higher speeds, capacity and range, they can critically reduce the number of elements in the network for lower power consumption and more efficient architectures, thus lowering the cost per bit per kilometer and the total cost of ownership (TCO).
Continued innovations in silicon will be essential for more advances in DSPs. DSPs manage the complex modulation formats and help in mitigating signal impairments and ensuring reliable data transmission over wider channel spacings. They are instrumental in implementing and adapting to real-time signal processing, including shaping the signal constellation based on probabilistic models to enhance overall system performance. They are also critical in shaping and demodulating signals with complex modulation schemes such as shaped 16QAM and 64QAM modulation.
Other innovations are being pursued in spectrum optimization. WDM techniques were initially limited by the amount of spectrum available in the C-band, which has been seen as optimal for longer distances and enabled the use of amplifiers that could amplify multiple channels at once. The L-band also featured low propagation loss but needed innovations in lasers, modulators and detectors, and amplifiers. With these recent innovations, webscalers are now using C+L-band technologies to build super-highways around the world. The next stage of innovation is to extend optics to the S-band, which will again require innovations, for instance, in semiconductor amplifiers (SOAs), which show great promise.
Finally, there are several innovations happening in optical fiber itself. Subsea fiber cables can now fit more high-density fibers into the cables without increasing their diameters. In terrestrial networks, where the cable laying equipment doesn’t put the same constraints on diameter, cable suppliers are using high-density ribbon fibers, which can already double the number of fibers in a cable, with another doubling anticipated. Ribbon fibers, unfortunately, lose more information than standard fibers and are more suitable, therefore, in shorter distance networks such as metro applications. Looking to the future, work is being done on multi-core fibers that carry multiple channels in a single fiber. Hollow core fibers are also being tested that increase the speed of light by up to 50 percent over normal fibers and offer lower latencies and even more spectrum ranges.
Agile, dynamic networks
Just as optics innovations such as DSPs rely on silicon advancements, these will also prove key to improving the performance of IP networks. Custom chipsets designed to optimize performance for specific workloads, such as IP routing, will be essential for achieving higher packet processing speeds and enhanced scalability. Power consumption and space are critical considerations in data centers, and especially edge computing. Innovative chipsets will incorporate design improvements to enhance power efficiency, and more compact and integrated designs for streamlined form factors, improved performance and simplified maintenance.
On the software front, the use of edge clouds to achieve the ultra-low latency and high reliability that many industrial automation use cases need calls for cloud-native networks that can orchestrate virtual resources in an automated way. This is because edge cloud use cases are highly variable and intermittent in terms of performance needs. They demand tremendous scalability and responsiveness from the underlying network. Like compute and storage, network resources essentially need to be elastically consumable, on demand.
These requirements are not limited to the local network since edge clouds will do some processing locally and some, centrally. A very high level of reliability and dynamism must be delivered end to end. This means across data center network fabrics, enterprise private wireless access, and wide area network (WAN) IP routing and optical and microwave transport networks.
Fortunately, the WAN has followed the example of data center fabrics by adopting containerized virtual network functions, software-defined networking (SDN) and programmable networking. It is now possible to talk about network infrastructure as code or network-as-a-service (NaaS) from end to end. This means that the development and provisioning of network services are subject to the same software-driven processes as the operations and application layers above. Thus, it is now possible, and necessary, to bring NetOps into the DevOps world by ensuring that network operations teams are included along with IT operations.
As cloud-based applications and their need for network support become more dynamic, network operations will be subject to constant and growing demands. With Industry 4.0 technologies being adopted by many essential service providers from water and power to transportation, manufacturing and healthcare, the webscale network will need to meet mission-critical requirements. As the tempo in this dance of innovation reaches a new scale, a new partner experience is needed to bring knowledge and innovation across all parts of the webscale infrastructure. The experience and innovation of partners will be important to meeting the new standards of mission-critical reliability in all layers of the network. Their thirst for openness and collaboration will be essential in the coming era of cloud and automation.
