Mediaboss Marketing

As Stephen Lawson reports at InfoWorld, social networking giant Facebook did some serious friending at an Optical Society of America meeting held in conjunction with this year's Optical Fiber Communications (OFC) Conference in San Francisco.

Silicon photonics technology provides the basis for optical networking, capable of supporting data transfer speeds much greater than the current industry Ethernet standard of 10 gigabits per second. Facebook, which needs enormous data transfer capability in order to keep its 1.2 billion active users' news feeds up to date, is giving this technology a big "Like."

Mass Rapid Transit for Facebook Data

Facebook's data challenges are exceptional in scale, but they are typical of those faced by many companies since both the sheer quantity of data and the demand for moving it through networks is growing swiftly. Keeping Facebook users' news feeds updated means calling on hundreds or thousands of servers to contribute specific data to the timelines, a process called "east-west traffic."

As a result, the social site is now using mainly 40-gigabit Ethernet connections and, in some cases, 100-gigabit links. The emerging silicon photonics technology is well suited to supporting these ultrafast links, whence Facebook's interest in silicon photonics and optical networking.

Ultrafast optical networking technology will not stay confined to Facebook's data centers for long. In an IT ecosystem increasingly oriented toward the cloud, most midsize firms' IT departments will probably not rush to incorporate optical networking in a backroom data center. However, these firms will tap into cloud resources that provide this capability, which means it is time for midsize IT to consider how it will use ultrafast data transfers.

For Midsize IT, Making the Most of Lightning in the Cloud

At one time in the not-too-distant past, most midsize firms would have been expected to wait for the downward trickle of this technology from the highest-powered data center to the typical smaller data center of an IT department's back room.

Some midsize firms, which for various reasons need both ultrafast connectivity and an on-site data center, will be standing in line for access to silicon photonics networking; but in an IT ecosystem in which a growing range of capabilities and resources are available through cloud computing, the cloud is where most midsize IT departments will go in order to capture lightning speed in a bottle. Cloud access means that midsize IT will generally not need to concern itself with the internal specifications of ultrafast optical networks. All the same, IT managers and professionals at these firms should begin thinking about how they can leverage ultrafast networking in the cloud.

Social business is clearly one area that will benefit from ultrafast data transfer speeds, particularly for those midsize firms concerned with streaming media, for which speed is paramount. Analytics will provide another natural home for fast data access. Big data analytics aims to crunch enormous amounts of data and to do it fast enough for real-time updating of analytics dashboards.

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Silicon Photonics Technology Gets a "Like" from Facebook