Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1414667
October/November/December 2021 I 21 FIGURE 1: Data center interconnect market growth. Source: MarketsandMarkets Private Ltd., April 2020. DRIVERS FOR DCI MONITORING The global data center interconnect market is expected to grow to $14B (USD) by 2025, 1 representing a 56 percent increase over the 2020 market size and a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.1 percent (Figure 1). availability concerns, while remaining connected to other processing and control functions in larger data centers. For applications like these, DCI performance and integrity will be essential, especially for applications that may Data center interconnect (DCI) demands flawless optical transmission performance and exceptional reliability to ensure massive volumes of traffic are carried without interruption or degradation. Fiber optic DCI routes support a variety of important applications and customer segments spanning low-latency financial and commercial transactions, hosted applications and big data storage, high-volume media content delivery, and security-critical healthcare and government data transfers. Any outage or performance degradation can have significant financial and social impacts. This is reflected in the service level agreements (SLAs) dark and lit optical fiber providers must offer to win the DCI business from hyperscale and private data center operators. Additionally, security is of paramount concern to DCI customers where a potential breach can be even more impactful than an outage. Leading DCI providers—service providers and dark fiber operators—are embracing multi-layer monitoring with AI-driven analytics to assure and secure their services. Artificial Intelligence (AI) stream processing enables physical and network monitoring data to be analyzed together, in real time, within an efficient compute footprint. put human lives at risk. At Huawei's Global Mobile Broadband Forum in 2019, Telefonica's CTO, Enrique Blanco, neatly sum- med up society's future dependency on a highly robust and secure 5G network when he said: "If we have a black- out today in 4G we would be suffering, and our customers would be suffering. If in the future we stop a 5G network, we will be stopping society: we will be stopping the hospitals, cars and industry. We will be stopping more than a massive number of customers." Hyperscale internet providers, such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Netflix continue to grow, con- necting more devices across more geographies and delivering more highly connected and integrated services. As 5G-enabled network applications and services continue to take hold, they will begin to dominate data center usage. Video content alone is expected to contribute more than 90 percent of the forecasted 5G traffic volumes 2 by 2022 and is already challenging operators with a CAGR of 32 percent predicted from 2019-2022. 3 A key 5G-enabled data center driver will be the inter- net of things (IoT), with the market forecasted to grow to 50 billion connected devices by 2030 4 that place enor- mous strain on both data centers and DCI. While many IoT applications may only generate small amounts of infrequent, time-insensitive data, others will be trans- mitting significantly larger volumes with requirements for ultra-low latencies, high reliability, and high availability. Applications, such as augmented reality (AR), con- nected and automated vehicles, industrial control systems, and remote telemedicine, will take advantage of mobile edge compute (MEC) data centers to address latency and