SCALING SUBSEA BUSINESS WITH THE CLOUD BY DAN PARSONS
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or more than one hundred years the telecommunications industry was a regulated monopoly in North America with AT&T delivering services and its subsidiary, Western Electric, supplying the equipment. There was not much opportunity for innovation until 1984 when AT&T was spun off into seven regional companies and in 1996 when competition was opened for local phone services. The market boomed as competitors vied for customers with new and innovative products which led to the rapid growth of the internet. The voice-based telecommunication system needed to change to an economically viable, Internet Protocol (IP) network supporting all services with wireline and wireless broadband connectivity. Now, another boom is underway: the cloud, which is once again transforming our lives and the network. Numerous books have been written about all these changes regarding new businesses and technologies, winners and losers, but one thing has been constant through all this – the insatiable demand for more bandwidth. This demand is founded on a solid basis – the paying consumer. In fact, the demand has a predictable trajectory and is even labeled a
“law” - Nielsen’s Law. Like Moore’s Law for compute power, Nielsen predicts an annualized growth rate in bandwidth of 50 percent, starting with 300 bits per second in 1983, to today’s 100 megabits per second connectivity.
Figure 1: Neilson's Law
DATA CENTER PRINCIPLES FOR TRANSPORT The traditional communication service providers (CSPs), or telcos, have had their share of challenges keeping pace with capacity demand economically, with an infrastructure that must evolve. Why the needed
change? Because paying consumers and enterprises are realizing the value of the cloud, and data centers (DCs) are their source for content and services. It is predicted that by 2019 more than half the world’s population will be connected to the internet, and by extension, the cloud. Since the cloud is driving connectivity, shouldn’t the network scale with the cloud as is done in the DC? DCs are now influencing the network, with the network now attempting to mimic the DC. For example, software-defined networking (SDN) and virtualization, which originated within the DC, are now being implemented in the network. This enables the network to instantly and economically scale its services from a virtually infinite pool of compute and storage resources. Many network functions can be virtualized or operated on x86 servers, and performance can be instantly and economically scaled as needed. This is not the case with traditional optical transport networks tasked to support the emerging dominant connectivity of 100 gigabit per second (Gb/s) for data center interconnect. This is because 100 Gb/s services require their own optical channel, the capacity-reach performance of
Since the cloud is driving connectivity, shouldn't the network scale with the cloud?
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