Cisco recently took the wraps off a new optical receiver that lets data center customers better support AI and other high-throughput applications. The 400G bidirectional (BiDi) optical transceiver allows customers to upgrade to higher throughput without tearing out existing fiber, simplifying the upgrade process and making it easier to modernize current 40G and 100G BiDi optical networks.
Unlike traditional duplex optics that use two fibers to deliver throughout, BiDi sends and receives simultaneously over a single fiber strand in each direction, effectively doubling fiber utilization, according to Bill Gartner, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s optical systems and optics business.
“Enterprise data center customers have been using BiDi optics for many generations, and this is the next generation of that technology that lets them leverage their existing fiber infrastructure, reducing fiber count for them so they can use one fiber instead of two. And it paves the way to further higher-speed upgrades such as 800G,” Gartner told Network World.
“In the data center, what’s really changed in the last year or so is that with AI buildouts, there’s much, much more optics that are part of 400G and 800G. It’s not so much using 10G and 25G optics, which we still sell a ton of, for campus applications. But for AI infrastructure, the 400G and 800G optics are really the dominant optics for that application,” Gartner said.
Most of the AI infrastructure builds have been for training models, especially in hyperscaler environments, Gartner said. “I expect, towards the tail end of this year, we’ll start to see more enterprises deploying AI infrastructure for inference. And once they do that, because it has an Nvidia GPU attached to it, it’s going to be a 400G or 800G optic.”
Core enterprise applications – such as real-time trading, high-frequency transactions, multi-cloud communications, cybersecurity analytics, network forensics, and industrial IoT – can also utilize the higher network throughput, Gartner said.
Cisco has been developing BiDi technology for years, rolling out a QSFP+ 40Gb bi-directional (BiDi) transceiver in 2014. The next generation dual-rate BiDi, which featured 40Gb and 100Gb operational modes, came in 2020.
BiDi transceivers are plugged into the ports of core data center switches, such as the Nexus 9000/9300/9500 series and Catalyst 9000, as well as Cisco data center routers to handle the optical transmission of data over multimode fiber, according to Cisco.
Source:: Network World