Ciena’s technology — the subsea cable tech, to be exact — underpins the submarine cables connecting data centers across 72 countries, and the rising demand for high-performance data center compute will continue to drive innovation in submarine cable technologies, according to Ciena CTO Steve Alexander.

The networking vendor counts more than 1,300 in-service deployments of modern and legacy submarine line terminal equipment (SLTE), which help power subsea cable networks in nine major global routes. Subsea cable technology “is what connects the world together,” Alexander told SDxCentral.

Though 400 or so cables lining the ocean floor are responsible for carrying 99.99% of all internet traffic, the cable network technology that sits on the land — where Ciena comes into play — is “what took us from the world of megabit transport to the world of terabit transport, which is where we are today,” he said. “We build the circulatory system for the internet.”

Along with that performance acceleration comes energy efficiency gains, giving this method of data transfer and connectivity the aptitude for mitigating the environmental impact of growing data center capacity.

“We've been able to dramatically reduce space, power and complexity over the last 25 to 30 years,” Alexander said. “Every time we can advance the basic line rates on these systems — for example, every time you double the rate at which you can send information, if you can do it more or less the same physical size, the same kind of area on the silicon chip — you can cut the cost in half, and you can also cut the power consumption down.”

If data center capacity and demand continue to rise unabated, however, are more efficient technologies enough to make a difference?

The major hyperscale cloud providers are actively working to transition their data centers from carbon-intensive fossil fuel power to renewable energy (an area that represents a main source of data center emissions), but the world’s data centers are still expected to quadruple the amount of energy they use by 2030.

“We, as a society, have learned how to consume connectivity and capacity just like we’ve learned how to consume disk space and computer memory,” Alexander said. “We just keep going. [We] just fill it up,” he said.

Corporate promises are one thing, but only time will tell whether or not the pace of innovation can keep up with demand.