The high-speed optical module market has experienced rapid growth since the end of 2016. Its core driving force is the upgrade and new construction requirements for 40G and 100G modules in overseas large/super large data centers.

As the core device for photoelectric conversion, optical modules are widely used in data centers. In the scenario of a transmission speed of more than 10G and a transmission distance of more than 10 meters, the optical module (or the active optical cable AOC that encapsulates the multimode fiber and the VCSEL optical module) is the only mature wiring scheme. New applications such as high-definition video, live broadcast, and VR are driving the rapid growth of global network traffic. Emerging application requirements such as cloud computing, IaaS services, and big data are placing higher demands on data transmission within the data center. Therefore, the data center not only needs to continue to expand and build, but also needs to continue to evolve on the network architecture to achieve non-blocking network performance.

In the process of data center architecture evolution, the demand for optical modules has undergone new changes. We can calculate and analyze the traditional three-tier architecture, the improved three-tier architecture, and the emerging two-tier architecture. The number of optical modules that need to be configured in a single cabinet has increased significantly.

1) The number of optical modules in the traditional three-layer architecture is about 8.8 times that of the number of cabinets (eight 40G optical modules, 0.8 100G optical modules);

2) The number of optical modules in the improved three-layer architecture is about 9.2 times that of the number of cabinets (eight 40G optical modules, 1.2 100G optical modules);

3) The number of optical modules in the emerging two-tier architecture is about 44 or 48 times that of the number of cabinets (80-90% of which are 10G optical modules, with 8 40G modules or 4 100G modules); In the overseas market, due to the rapid development of downstream applications such as cloud computing, third-party data centers and cloud computing vendors have rapidly developed their own data centers, and the network architecture has continued to evolve toward flatness, which has generated strong demand for high-speed optical modules. In contrast, the domestic market is still in the early stage of development due to downstream applications, network traffic pressure and data transmission requirements within the data center are low. The domestic digital high-speed optical module market still needs to wait for the downstream application to mature.

The flattening of data centers is mainly to solve the internal (east-west) data flow in the data center. The east-west data is mainly composed of cloud computing, cloud migration, IaaS virtual configuration, distributed computing, and big data (large data volume, storage and different servers). Application driver. Overseas markets such as AWS, Google and other cloud platforms, Salesforce and other professional platforms, as well as the rapid development of distributed computing and big data applications, drive the flattening of data centers and generate strong demand for high-speed optical modules. In contrast, domestic downstream applications are still in the stage of market cultivation and business model exploration. The domestic high-speed digital light module market is expected to enter the period of explosive growth after the downstream application enters the mature period.

Author: Anonymous

Source: 51CTO