Is Now the Right Time to Integrate O-O-O Switching Into Your Hosting Centers and Peering Sites?

According to the Yankee Group, server and storage virtualization have already helped more than 75 percent of all corporations to improve utilization of their systems from an average of approximately 20 percent to more than 40 percent.  However, server and storage virtualization and cloud computing gains will not be realized without a network infrastructure prepared to meet the demands of faster processors and more robust virtualization and cloud computing systems.

Larry Smar of UCSD predicts that network bandwidth is growing by an order of magnitude every 5 years and states, "Grid-intensive applications will require an international distributed cyber infrastructure based on petascale computing, exabyte storage, and terabit networks."  This growth is faster than the well known Moore's Law which states the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.   And Infonetics reports that the 10, 40 and 100 Gbps markets are expected to total a cumulative $105 billion US between 2008 and 2013.

This all points to new network architectures in the data center and peering sites that deliver increased speed and reliability, while decreasing management complexity, and power and space requirements.  New architectures are required that use copper and O-E-O technologies as transition points to legacy systems and where Layer 2 and Layer 3 traffic management features are required - and O-O-O Layer 1 switching where speed, reliability, and super fast network recovery are required for connections between server and storage racks and between the data center/peering site and service provider WAN.

O-O-O Layer 1 switching is protocol and bit rate independent and can therefore seamlessly transition from 10G to 40G and 100G speeds today, without requiring a forklift switch upgrade layer.  Polatis O-O-O switches support dark fiber switching, which allows the pre-provisioning of M:N sparing of protection fibers, should a failure occur on the primary fiber.

Polatis O-O-O switches are compact, consume less than 1 watt per fiber, are simple to install, operate, and maintain, and help improve the bottom line for any data center green metric.  This results in a significant savings when compared to copper and/or O-E-O based solutions.

And, Polatis switches are cost competitive with today's O-E-O switches.

Common applications for O-O-O switches in the data hosting center and peering sites include automatic protection switching, enhanced network monitoring and management, intelligent fiber distribution, and colorless/directionless wavelength switching.

Isn't it time for you to consider including O-O-O switching at your hosting and peering sites?