SneakerNet versus Bandwidth Calendaring
SneakerNet is a term that refers to the act of backing up data by sending physical copies of the data rather than sending the data over the Internet. This is due to the fact that large data sets could be sent faster by FedEx than over the Internet, as discussed in the XKCD comic What If (https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/). However, as internet speeds have increased, is it time to the put the sneakers away in the closet?
Image from XKCD What If Comics
An example of a very large data set that justified the use of SneakerNet was the transfer of the Hubble Space Telescope data set of 120 terabytes of data (https://royal.pingdom.com/fedex-still-faster-than-the-internet/). In this article from 2007, they calculated a time of 111 days to transfer the data set over a 100 Mb/sec connection. Today, connections are available at 100 Gb/sec, an increase in speed of 3 orders of magnitude. At today’s speeds, the same Hubble data set could be transferred in just 2.6 hours.
However, fasters speeds are not all that is needed to replace SneakerNet. For remote back-up to become a reality, the ability to easily reconfigure the network is also required. Reconfiguring the network for a direct connection into the storage devices rather than through intermediate equipment will improve the data transfer. While Software Defined Networking (SDN) has brought automation to the ethernet and switch level, physical fiber connections have typically been provisioned manually. In the past it has not made sense to manually provision for connections that might only last for a few hours. With dynamic fiber cross connects, extending SDN to the physical laser for Bandwidth Calendaring now becomes a reality.
Telescent has designed a fully autonomous cross connect solution that can address this need. The Telescent G4 NTM is an innovative automated fiber cross-connect system that allows software control of the physical layer while scaling to address the needs of large data center campuses. The system consists of 1,008 input and 1,008 output ports, each connected by a short, uninterrupted internal fiber cross-connect. When a reconfiguration is requested, a robot-driven gripper removes an internal fiber from the original port and moves it to the desired new port in just a matter of minutes. A new cross-connect can be requested remotely at any time and from any configuration, ensuring complete flexibility and programmability.
With remote reconfiguration and the higher connection bandwidths available today, the Telescent NTM allows large data sets to be backed-up remotely. These bandwidth backups can be performed during periods of low bandwidth demand such as overnight, create a new service of Bandwidth Calendaring. With this capability, it is time to move on from SneakerNet.