Whether interconnecting facilities in support of high-frequency trading, high-performance computing, business continuity, disaster recovery, migration of virtual machines among physical servers or some other demanding application, there are certain networking requirements that tend to be shared among enterprise data-center managers. Optical networking is not a commodity technology space, and data-center managers must investigate at least seven primary areas of technological differentiation in doing their due diligence to deploy the right solution for their given organization’s specific interconnection requirements:
- Latency—Critically important in electronic trading and a growing range of industries, network latency varies substantially from fiber path to fiber path and multiplexing platform to multiplexing platform. Reducing the fiber path by one physical kilometer of fiber translates into five microseconds of one-way latency that is eliminated, and Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) introduces significantly more packet delay than does Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM). Read more
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Certain local and storage area network (LAN and SAN) applications have such severe intolerance of packet delay that even deploying the latest and greatest network interface cards, high-capacity core network switches and multi-core servers will not necessarily ensure that required performance characteristics are achieved. Delivering ultra-low latency in connecting data centers demands its own targeted strategy.
