From Scott on the Porch Thread ---> Interesting article on optics, storage, EMC & CSCO...
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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 Services
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, customers are realizing that this information is
really business-critical. High-speed communication and
fast connections are keys for success. Optical
technologies, like dense wavelength division
multiplexing (DWDM), play a very important role in
helping companies such as EMC and Cisco work with
their customers to extend the connection distances
between company locations and to increase the speed
of such tasks as information backup or disaster
recovery.
Optical technology has come down in price and has
improved in functionality and capability to the point
where enterprise customers can afford to use it quite
cost effectively. In the past, it was primarily 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, companies 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 are being
used to connect the buildings within. 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, residential and
business areas and 'fibering them up'."
Virtually Unlimited Opportunity
Engineer: "The pure market demand for storage is
phenomenal. With the rise in the number of internets
and intranets, storage growth is going through the roof.
Additionally, information is "going multimedia" in that it
is no longer just text but voice, data, video and graphics
as well. On top of this, 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 the low cost of optical
transport devices is creating a tornado market.
Now that enterprises have access to this really low-cost,
high-capacity, and fast optical connections among all
their company locations, they can consider deploying
another important application for optical technologies:
content streaming, or real-time audio and 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 and there's no longer a 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 DWDM is this. If you
look at a fiber, each wavelength is a color. So, today we
can have 32 colors on a fiber, or 32 wavelengths on a
fiber. Today, each wavelength or each color can transmit
up to ten gigabits of information. In a two or three
years, this will go up to 40 gigabits. In two or three
years after that, this will probably go up to 80 gigabits.
In experimental, laboratory conditions, we can reach
even higher rates.
However, in the context of what is feasible, affordable
and maintainable in the real world, we now can
effectively use 32 wavelengths at 10 gigabits each, for a
capacity of 320 gigabytes. Tomorrow, it'll be 40 gigs
multiplied by 32, or 1.2 terabytes in capacity. After that,
it will be 2.5 terabytes, followed by 5 terabytes and so
on."
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
enterprises are looking for in their networks. Today,
customers are looking at gigabit Ethernet to power their
networks. A year or two down the road, they're going to
look at 10 gigabit Ethernet, a 10-fold increase. But fiber
optics will provide virtually unlimited bandwidth,
enabling customers to take advantage of communicating
at optical speeds.
Consider the cable TV industry as an analogy. 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, then put coaxial cable in to distribute it to all
the homes. When folks from Manhattan went out to the
farm area for their vacations 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 with 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 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
tremendous demand and more applications for this fast
bandwidth.. This is a completely different paradigm from
what we had before. And this demand will not just be
limited to the United States; it will be global.
Think about what the Internet will do, as John
Chambers [CEO of Cisco Systems] frequently 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 improving
the level of education for the whole world very quickly.
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 |
