“Cloud computing” is one of the hottest topics at present. In China, most people of the Internet industry should have heard of “Ali Cloud”, “Tencent Cloud” and “Baidu Cloud”. When it comes to cloud computing, I always think of data centers, and then a picture of data centers floating in the clouds appears in my mind. This is because most of the time, cloud computing comes together with the topic of data center. So what is the relationship between cloud computing and data center? Let’s see it together.
In the last article (How Much Do You Know About Supercomputing, High Performance Computing and Cloud Computing?), I mentioned the definition of cloud computing — a pay-per-use model that provides available, convenient and on-demand network access to the configurable computing resource sharing pool (resources include network, server, storage, application software, services).
The concept of cloud computing is proposed to break through the shortcomings of physical devices, because physical machines are too heavy and inconvenient, users may only need a computer keyboard, display and other peripherals. What shall we do? Physical devices in data centers are very powerful, and virtualization in cloud computing is to virtualize a small piece of it to customers, who no longer need to have more advanced configuration. Virtualization may not be enough to meet the huge demand, so there is a “cloud” (or “pooling”), which places many machines in a pool. No matter how many CPUs, memory, hard disk virtual computers users need, the pool can find areas to meet users’needs. To satisfy virtualization, it is more flexible and dynamic.
So, cloud computing is to put the hard disk and CPU on the Internet in the user’s own computer or on the company’s server, and make unified dynamic calls. It only needs to be charged by hours or even minutes, instead of buying computers and servers.
Cloud Computing is Accelerating the Development of Data Centers
The pace of global data is getting faster and faster. When the Internet is looking forward to the future in all kinds of ways, without the support of data centers, the reality may seem skeletal. No matter how cloud computing changes, it is necessary to rely on data center to achieve landing. It can be said that data center is the root of cloud computing.
Driven by the growth of cloud computing services, ultra-large data centers used to support cloud computing services need higher bandwidth, faster data processing speed, lower latency and longer transmission distance. Traditional electrical interconnection is often criticized for its low speed and crosstalk. All-optical network interconnection has become a trend. Cloud computing data centers need to deploy optical fiber cabling systems to connect servers, memory and switches. With the growth of scale, the increase, movement and change of wiring system become more and more difficult. Data centers are moving towards structured wiring one after another.
According to Cisco’s prediction, 77% of the world’s data traffic will come from the data center by 2020. Cloud computing, as an efficient and low-cost solution, has become the best solution to this challenge. Large-scale data centers, which mainly support cloud computing, have gradually transformed the three-tier switching network structure into the spine-leaf two-tier network structure. Spine-leaf two-tier network structure can connect each spine switch and each leaf switch by fully cross-connected cabling, which can improve the efficiency of network routing and significantly reduce the delay.
The advantage of this architecture, which meets the requirements of cloud computing data center, is scalable, modular, flexible, low hardware dependence, and highly available.
At present, the cloud computing data center is in the stage of continuous construction to build a new ecology of “intelligence and industry” in the way of cloud service,, which lays a foundation for the intelligent transformation of enterprises. Take China’s Tencent cloud computing data center as an example, following Tianjin, Shanghai and Shenzhen-Shantou Cooperation Zone, the first phase of Chongqing project started trial operation in June this year, and the second phase of the project will have the operation and storage capacity of 200,000 servers.
According to the trend of global data centers, cloud computing is accelerating the development of data centers, and cloud computing data centers will completely replace traditional data centers in the future.
This trend puts forward higher demand for device manufacturers such as optical transceiver modules. Compared with other devices, optical transceiver modules require higher density, speed and integration in cloud computing data centers. It is necessary for cloud era to meet the production of optical transceiver modules in cloud computing data centers.
As an innovator of global optical interconnection, Gigalight has independently developed a series of optical transceiver module products to meet the needs of next-generation cloud data centers, and on this basis provides higher-level online cloud programming services, and developed Gigalight universal cloud encoder for online programming. The compatibility codes support more than 20 mainstream brand switches or routers, providing great convenience for customers. For more details, please visit the Gigalight official website (www.gigalight.com).
