Categories: CloudDatacentre

Seagate Will Test Optical Interconnect Technologies For The World’s Hungriest Data Centres

Storage specialist Seagate will investigate using optical interconnect technology in its Kinetic Ethernet disk drives for future data centres, the company announced this week.

Partnering up with PETRA, the Photonics Electronics Technology Research Association in Japan, Seagate wants to help make optical interconnect technologies commercially viable for large scale data centre deployments in the near future.

Seagate said it would deploy some prototypes as part of the European Nephele and PhoxTrot projects, with PETRA contributing its optical I/O core technology for the test runs.

Bandwidth benefits

Using optical interconnect technology, where data transfer takes place via optical cables rather than their traditional brethren, can dramatically boost bandwidth capabilities and reduce power consumption.

Seagate’s first proof of concept demos won’t be completed until later this year, but such technology aims to cut cost and power consumption – major concerns in exascale data centres.

Alex Worrall, senior engineering director at Seagate, reckons that optical interconnect technology will be not only empowering for data centres but disruptive, too.

He told TechWeekEurope: “Photonic interconnect technologies are a key enabling technology for future exascale cloud data centre environments. Seagate is pleased to be working with PETRA, a leading international technology disrupter in this space.”

With increasing Internet traffic thanks to cloud computing, data centre racks are bearing the brunt of the world’s computing needs, so new research into interconnect technologies is not only potentially massively profitable but necessary.

Hardware makers are looking for high throughput, low latency solutions that can offer bandwidths of up to 100 Gbit/s and also reduce power consumption, therefore saving money.

Project NEPHELE is a European collaborative project that wants to develop “a dynamic optical network infrastructure that aims to overcome current architectural limitations and drastically reduce cost and power consumption, enabling cloud data centres to scale gracefully”.

Take our cloud in 2016 quiz here!

Ben Sullivan

Ben covers web and technology giants such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft and their impact on the cloud computing industry, whilst also writing about data centre players and their increasing importance in Europe. He also covers future technologies such as drones, aerospace, science, and the effect of technology on the environment.

Recent Posts

Google Joins Others In Ending Diversity Initiatives

Google becomes latest tech firm to scrap some of its diversity hiring targets, and cites…

7 mins ago

Ofcom Grants License For Amazon Kuiper To Challenge Starlink In UK

New challenger for Elon Musk's Starlink in UK, after Ofcom grants earth station network licence…

4 hours ago

Openreach Tests 50Gbps Broadband Connection With Nokia

Possible broadband speed of the future? Openreach and Nokia test UK’s first live 50Gbps fibre…

5 hours ago

Jeff Bezos’s $10bn Earth Fund Halts Climate Group Backing – Report

Amazon founder and one of the world’s richest men, Jeff Bezos, has been accused of…

6 hours ago