“We are honored to accept this prestigious award. Based on our experience, we see coherent moving from metro core to access aggregation networks such as 5G backhaul and fiber deep Remote PHY for cable access. Access networks delivering high bandwidth services could dramatically increase energy requirements to power and cool the equipment providing these services. We believe Acacia is on the forefront of providing the high performance, low power, compact form factor solutions necessary to help enable data centers to run on sustainable energy.”

• Raj Shanmugaraj, president and chief executive officer of Acacia Communications

We also marked our attendance at the show with the announcement of our Coherent ZR Optics Solutions for 100G CFP-DCO ZR and 100G/200G CFP2 ZR pluggable modules. Small coherent modules for very compact systems, they are designed to address 5G and fiber deep applications, as well as data center edge and enterprise campus applications.

In talking with customers about the CFP2 module, we heard that they like the capacity granularity for metro with 100G/200G per wave. We also had a lot of good discussion on the following key features:

• Support for 200G/ lambda – at a significant low cost/bit
• Simplified system integration with DCO interface
• Integrated functionality eliminating the need for additional ASICs: OTU framer function, Layer 1 Encryption
• Easy network maintenance with rich performance monitoring such as link dispersion/PMD/PDL/OSNR

To learn more about how the CFP2 pluggable coherent module can help network operators reduce CapEX and OpEx, increase reach, and prepare for future growth, watch this video.

We look forward to seeing everyone at ECOC, September 23 – 27 in Rome, Italy.

It’s not a well-kept secret: immense data centers, the lifeblood of business and consumer technology networks, consume a huge amount of energy. Today, we wanted to take a look at one of the world’s largest operators of data centers, Google, and its parent corporation, Alphabet.
Google’s Cloud Platform Infrastructure

According to Data Center Knowledge:

“Google has placed a lot of focus (and dedicated a lot of resources) to selling cloud services to enterprises, going head-to-head against the market giant Amazon Web Services and the second-largest player in the space, Microsoft Azure … While the company already has what is probably the world’s largest cloud, it was not built to support enterprise cloud services. To do that, the company needs to have data centers in more locations, and that’s what it has been doing, adding new locations to support cloud services and adding cloud data center capacity wherever it makes sense in existing locations.”

While the company is one of the world’s largest creators/users of renewable energy, that’s a lot of power, both in aggregate and as a single entity. Large cloud companies take extraordinary care to optimize their power usage in data centers. According to its most recent data, Google’s most efficient data center, based on PUE (power-usage effectiveness, that is, the percentage of power that goes to actual computing rather non-computing uses within the data center), is in St. Gislain, Belgium. With a PUE of 1.09, for every watt used for computing, only .09 is used for non-computing needs, such as cooling and power conversion.

Yet even the MOST efficient data center uses a tremendous amount of power. While exact figures are difficult to come by, one researcher pegged Google’s overall energy use at 3.2GW. Using rough numbers, on average, with 15 data centers worldwide, each uses 213 MW of power per year.

Demand for bandwidth continues to grow

Today’s cloud datacenters are transitioning their server interfaces from 10Gbps to 25Gbps. The transition to 50Gbps server interfaces is anticipated within the next 2-3 years. This drives the need for higher capacity switches and optical interfaces both inside and between datacenters. As the increased need for power cannot continue apace, alternative solutions are necessary.

Next-generation networks are adopting digital signal processing techniques designed to overcome physical impairments in optical fibers at higher data rates. This signal processing is implemented in CMOS, taking advantage of advanced process nodes to implement low power solutions. Moving to smaller process nodes allows both higher capacity interfaces and lower power implementations. Moore’s Law predicts that the density of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every 2 years. Along with increased density, these smaller geometries may result in lower power.

The Acacia advantage

Acacia has specialized in making extremely power efficient optical connectivity solutions. By optimizing the design of both the digital signal processor (DSP) and silicon photonics, as well as developing highly optimized algorithms for features such as Forward Error Correction (FEC), Acacia has been able to reduce the power consumed by a coherent optical interconnect by as much as 85% in the last 5 years. Acacia’s awarding winning CFP2 is continuing that trend by helping our network equipment partners to deliver new levels of power efficiency in a pluggable coherent optical interface.