There is a well-known saying from a successful venture capitalist that “software is eating the world.” [1] In the article from 2011 written by Marc Andreessen, he made the point that young start-up companies based on software were able to compete against established companies and disrupt whole industries. In the decade since this article, software and virtualization has been widely used to redefine the way things are done in many industries.
Software has certainly had an impact in the data center world. Virtualization of computers has allowed workloads to be managed remotely on hardware in the cloud and the advent of software defined networking (SDN) has been one of the key methods to manage the exponential growth in data traffic across networks. But are there processes and procedures that software can’t eat?
A few years ago, financial analysts interviewed Equinix executives with the question of whether virtual cross connects would eat into their lucrative physical cross connect business. [2] Physical cross connects have a very high gross margin for multi-tenant data centers (MTDC), so the concern was that if customers switched to virtual cross connects, this would affect the MTDC’s profitability. Virtual cross connects certainly have some advantages for customers – with one physical connection to a large router, the customer can connect to any other company or service provider also connected to the router network. Virtual cross connects also allow the possibility of connectivity on demand – with the ability to increase / decrease bandwidth usage based on need. This convenience has led to the growth of virtual cross connects in MTDCs. For example, in 2020, Equinix added approximately 10,000 virtual cross connects according to its SEC filings.
While 10,000 virtual cross connects added in a year may seem like a lot, with over 400,000 total interconnects, virtual cross connects remain less than 10% of the total number of cross connects within Equinix. While virtual cross connects have the benefits listed above, they also can suffer from latency and packet loss issues, issues of growing importance for the development of edge data centers. Also, while virtual connectivity offers bandwidth on demand, since the bandwidth is shared among all users on the router network increasing demand from multiple users can create contention issues. Security is also a concern with virtual cross connects and some industries such as finance and health as well as government customers will require a dedicated physical interconnect for this reason. These security focused customers might be up to 50% of an MTDC customer base. Finally, even customers that use virtual cross connects need a physical connection to the virtual fabric.
While there will always be a need for physical cross connects, that doesn’t mean they need to be installed the way they’ve been done for the last 30 years – manually. Telescent has designed and built a robotic Network Topology Manager (NTMTM) that offers many of the benefits of software control with physical interconnections. The robotic system allows connections, reconfigurations and disconnections to be handled remotely while offering ultra-low loss and latching performance just like a regular fiber patch panel. Once the robot has automatically cleaned the fiber and placed it into the new connection, the connection will act like a static patch panel. And since the Telescent system includes a power monitor as well as other optional equipment such as an OTDR, any issue with the fiber can be monitored and diagnosed remotely. The Telescent NTMTM offers a pay-as-you-grow model and can scale from a few hundred ports to over 1,000 ports in a single system and then scale further with a leaf-spine network configuration and orchestration software. And since reliability will be critical for remote operation, the Telescent NTMTM has been certified to NEBS Level 3, has passed multiple customer trials simulating a 10-year lifetime and has over 1 billion port hours in live traffic operation.
While software can’t replace physical cross connects, with the Telescent NTM data center operators can bring the benefits of software control to the physical fiber layer.
[1] Marc Andreessen on Why Software Is Eating the World - WSJ, August 20, 2011
[2] Are Virtual Cross-Connects Equinix’s Friend or Foe? (datacenterknowledge.com)