Welcome to the Content "Big Bang"
EMC sat down with Cisco Systems' Carl Engineer for an in-depth discussion about optical networking. Engineer, marketing director for Cisco's metropolitan business unit and Cisco's resident optical networking visionary, talked about the applications of optical networking, the vast market demand for the technology, how the intersection of storage and optical technologies is driving the information boom, and the future implications of a wired world.
Escalating Demand
Engineer: "As the Internet continues to grow, people are conducting a lot more electronic transactions -- whether for data warehousing or for personal information. The amount of storage that's required has skyrocketed. So, as the storage centers increase in capacity, businesses are realizing that this information is really business-critical.
We need very, very high-speed communication, very fast connections. Optical technologies, like dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM), play a very important role in that process. The help companies like EMC and Cisco work with their customers to extend the connection distances between company locations and increase the speed at which tasks like information backup or disaster recovery can be performed.
Optical technology has come down in price and has come up in functionality and capability to the point where enterprise customers can afford to use it quite cost effectively. In the past, it was primarily the service providers that could afford to deploy it. But now, with the technology advancing so rapidly and fiber being deployed so widely, many enterprises can afford fiber and are using it for data networking. As a result, the capacity and speed at which they are able to communicate have skyrocketed. Now that the bandwidth is there, there's that initial stage when people are reassessing what they thought they could afford and what they thought they could do. They're suddenly saying, 'Wow! I've gone from 155 megabits to 320 gigabits! I need to change the way I look at the world!'
Huge amounts of fiber are being installed in metro areas like Washington, Philadelphia and Atlanta. And all of the buildings are being connected with fiber. I don't know the exact numbers of thousands of miles of fiber that are being installed, but it is huge. So now you're not just talking about connecting New York and Washington and Philadelphia as cities, now you're talking about actually going into each of the metro and residential and business areas and 'fibering up' all of those. Just the volume of fiber, the mileage of fiber, will be tremendous."
Virtually Unlimited Opportunity
Engineer: "The demand is phenomenal. It's just pure market demand. I mean, internets are rising, intranets are rising. Storage growth is just going through the roof. It's going multimedia in the context of not just text, but voice and data and video and graphics. Then you need to be able to access and retrieve that information very quickly. So, that confluence of high-capacity bandwidth from optical, huge demand for storage, and very, very low cost of optical transport is making a tornado market.
If you think about the storage capacity required for text-based e-mail compared with that required for music files, photos or digital videos, you can see where it's going to end up. Storage growth is just going to continue to be huge.
Now that you have this really low-cost, very, very high-capacity, very, very fast optical connection between all of your company locations, another application for optical technologies is content streaming: real-time audio, real-time video. Audio and video cannot only be distributed from one conference room to another; it can actually be distributed to every desktop in an organization in real-time. This is possible because now you have the bandwidth; there's no bottleneck.
If you look at the availability of fiber and this enormous capacity that is becoming available, then you look at the huge increase in the amount of storage that's going to be required, the question really comes back to how you keep it all connected efficiently and effectively. So, Cisco and EMC are actually talking about next-generation solutions: technology migrations. Cisco pioneered a lot of the IT networking that's used in local area networks, so we're looking at how we can bring those capabilities to a storage-networking environment. Cisco and EMC are working closely together to try to define the next steps in making this storage environment a reality."
How it Works
Engineer: "The way I think about it is if you look at a fiber, each wavelength is a color. So, today we can have 32 colors on a fiber: 32 wavelengths on a fiber. Each of those wavelengths and each of those colors can go up to ten gigabits today. In a couple or three years, they'll go up to 40 gigabits. In a couple or three years after that, they'll probably go up to 80 gigabits. Experimentally in the labs, they're up to much, much higher rates. But we're talking about it in the context of what's feasible, affordable and maintainable - not in the lab environment but in a real environment.
So, if you look at a fiber and say that 32 wavelengths are practical and economical, each of them going at ten gigabits, that's 320 gigs. And tomorrow, it'll be 40 gigs, multiplied by 32 and that's 1.2 terabytes. And then you double the wavelength, it's 2.5 terabytes; you double that again and it'll be 5 terabytes and it just keeps going. So, that's a huge amount of capacity."
Implications for the Future
Engineer: "Optical technology is the infrastructure of the future. It will provide the high bandwidth, the fast speeds and the huge scalability requirements that people are looking for in the network. Customers today are looking at gigabit Ethernet as a technology. A year or two down the road, they're going to look at 10 gigabit Ethernet: a 10-fold increase. Fiber optics gives you virtually unlimited bandwidth, enabling you to take advantage of communicating at optical speeds.
This is an important time. As an analogy, think of the cable TV industry. When cable TV first started, it was first available in rural America, where the TV signals were really hard to receive and the quality was lousy. To improve quality, companies went out there, installed a really great antenna and then put this coaxial cable in to distribute it to all the homes. When the folks from Manhattan went out to the farm area for their vacation and saw better TV quality than they saw in Manhattan, they said, 'Hey! We want that!' So, cable TV went into the metro areas.
Today, we're beginning to see the same thing happening to fiber optics. If you look at the telecommunications infrastructure, the past 100 years have been spent making sure that every home and every business is wired up and has a dial tone. In the next 20 years, I think the effort is going to be spent making sure every home and every business has a fiber connection. That'll be the fundamental infrastructure for the next 50 years, so you'll have high-speed capability to do anything you want.
We have millions of kids coming out of schools completely trained with computers. They will create more demand and more need for this fast bandwidth than anything else does. That is a completely different paradigm from what we had before. And it's not just in the United States; it's global.
Think about what the Internet will do, as John Chambers [CEO of Cisco Systems] says. You put the entire curriculum or the entire educational experience of an American child on the Internet, and an African child, an Indian child, a Chinese child, a Japanese child, a Korean child or an Australian child can get the benefit of that directly. All of a sudden, you're bringing up the level of education for the whole environment very, very fast.
Think of the demand that creates. Think of the knowledge base it creates. Think of the capabilities it creates. Think of the environment it creates. It's a great circle because it just fuels more demand for more capabilities, and everyone prospers.
Now, go forward 10 years. What does that mean for things like video rentals? Will you try to get your video on a tape or will you just get on the Internet with a very-high speed DSL, download your video for the night, keep it on your terabyte hard disk and view it, then erase it and download another one? What does that mean for storage?"
September 25, 2000
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