Data Center
Interconnects (DCI) products are targeted at the Edge or Border leaf of Data
Center environments, joining Data Centers to each other in a Point-to-Point or
Point-to-Multipoint fashion, or at times extending the connectivity to Internet
Gateways or peering points. Cisco has two converged DCI solutions; one is with
integrated DWDM and another with advanced L3 routing and L2 switching
technologies. A recent Dell’Oro report, forecasts the aggregate sales of
equipment for DCI will grow by 85 percent over the next five years. This is
driving strong demand for Ethernet Data Center Switch, and Routing
technologies.
The emerging need for simplified DCI offering spans four core markets.
· Mega Scale DC
· Cloud DC
· Telco Cloud
· Large Enterprises
The emergence of cloud computing has seen a rush of traffic being centralized in regional and global data center as the Data Center emergence to being the core of many service deliveries, more recently ‘far edge’ compute in 5G has reemphasized the trend, with DC’s now being at the core of 5G build outs, as Web companies and SPs embark on using automation and modern DC tools to turn up 5G sites at unprecedent rates and look at micro data centers at the edge to enhance the user experience.
DCI’s newest architectures is drive by massive DCs that need connecting by either leased lines from SPs or by deploying their own or leasing dark fiber.
Inside the DC they often deploy a mix of their home-grown applications over and defined technologies, mostly L2 type services to reach compute hosts at the peripherals, although we have seen recent trends of L3 being expended all the way to compute with Segment Routing (SR).
Outside the DC fiber is less abundant and inter DC solutions are fairly standardized with SP class products providing the richest functionality at the most optimal scale and price point. A motivation in the last 2 years for further DCI upgrades has been the migrating to MacSec for Inter DCI links.
A most recent trend is of 100GE and 400GE Data center build outs, driving DCI upgrades, we’re seeing customers migrate to higher speed links at different inflection points, with 100GE being the sweet spot current, creating catalyst for Terabit platforms that support advanced L2/L3 VPN services and Route and Bridge functions, case in point ASR9000 and NCS5500.