FEATURE
NEW INTERNET GEOGRAPHY Bringing the Sea to the Data Center
BY JEAN-FRANCOIS BAGET
I
n recent years, submarine telecom industry obviously saw a trend of strong capacity increase and change in the topology with submarine traffic now reaching the data centers (DC). As stated by all traffic demand analysis, the most growing demand is coming from the internet content providers, that accounted for about 55% of the overall undersea traffic in 2018 (source Telegeography) and beyond 80% on the transatlantic route. These internet content providers are mainly interconnecting their critical hyperscale data centers and building the infrastructure to deliver services from these data centers to the final users through various access points (PoPs). According to Cisco Global Cloud Index, these large data centers accounted in 2018 for 41% of processing power and 39% of IP traffic, and these figures will raise in 2021 to 69% and 55% respectively. Even if most of data center traffic remains inside its walls, the data center to data center traffic is growing at a CAGR of 32% and should be close to 3 ZettaBytes per year in 2021 (source Cisco GCI). With those figures in mind, we can now state that the submarine cable market is now married to the booming hyperscale data center market. Such linkage is visible in the geography of new projects: • Some landings are moving to areas where webscale internet companies have chosen to locate their major DC, like Virginia in the US or Ireland, • Some major DC are located in the main hubs of the submarine routes, the best example being Marseille and
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its successful DC developments, • Some cables are launched toward scarcely populated areas that have been chosen to host major DCs due to cool weather and cheap energy. Data Centers Interconnect (DCI) applications require not only the best transmission technology to support their huge capacity demand but also features to allow a seamless integration between the dry and wet plants. A unique network management system to supervise both types of network elements is a good example or a continuity of the COTDR signal over the full network. DCI applications requirements may not be drastically different from traditional undersea networks but they increase the emphasis on a few characteristics: • Integrated O&M for all supporting elements for efficient operation and control of the network, • High capacity combined with optimum cost per bit, • Minimum latency, • Security and confidentiality of the information. Data Center interconnection, Data Center connection to remote Point Of Presence (PoP) as well as PoP-toPoP long distance interconnection are usually covered in submarine systems under the generic term “PoP-to-PoP solution”. This generic term will be used for the remaining of the article.