Optical Breakthroughs Eyed for Storage

IBM and Hitachi were among vendors this week pushing optical wares at the OFC/NFOEC 2008 event in San Diego, and both are touting research they claim will affect the future of storage networking gear.

IBM, for instance, unveiled a "green optical link" developed at Big Blue's Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. Comprised of new optical modules and a data bus put together with standard components for a prototype, the "Optocard" offers up to 160 Gbit/s bandwidth (both transmit and receive on a total of 32 channels at 10 Gbit/s) at distances up to 100 meters. IBM says it consumes about as much power as a 100-watt lightbulb.

The optical transceiver portion of the link includes 24 transmitters and 24 receivers, each operating at 12.5 Gbit/s. Researchers have the modules with low-power 850 nm vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) and CMOS chips.

The optical data bus is made by laying polymer on top of electrical wiring to produce an optical channel. This channel can furnish much higher bandwidth between components on a circuit board (or between devices in a data center) than electrical channels do -- while consuming roughly 100 times less power.

IBM envisions this optical solution as a mechanism for file transfer, since it features a rate of 8 Tbit/s -- enough to run about 5,000 high-definition video streams, according to IBM. Applications would include video servers, consumer electronics, supercomputers, and medical archiving.Researchers say the new technology will show up first as a way to interconnect servers or supercomputers, since a board-level solution will take a couple of years more to commercialize. But the introduction of a working prototype is a key first step.

Elsewhere, other vendors made announcements that also could affect the storage industry, albeit in the long term:

At least one analyst sees these steps as part of a larger progression. "Optical is a great approach for boosting performance, lowering latency, and spanning distances, particularly when it's done in an energy-efficient manner," says Greg Schulz of the StorageIO Group. "In the case of IBM, if the technology can be applied down the road in a cost-effective manner to reduce power and cooling on a processor or computer or in chip-to-chip applications, to say that would be a benefit would be an understatement."

Other demos of faster data rate technologies herald better support for data protection and resiliency, as well as making the Internet generally faster to support more activity, Schulz says.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.