Major challenges in terms of data center interconnection – today's and tomorrow's – are centered around the ecosystem's significant growth. Coherent optics, however, present an opportunity to manage both bandwidth and power consumption needs across data center footprints, especially as compute-heavy and power-hungry artificial intelligence (AI) models continue to expand, Nokia Director of Optical Networks Product Marketing Serge Melle told SDxCentral.

The global increase in digital connectivity is a decades-long trend that Melle expects will continue requiring 40% more data center capacity each year – at least. And developing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities, as is increasingly popular, calls for compute that is orders of magnitude greater than standard web services or enterprise applications.

"That's going to drive a lot of bandwidth growth within the data center," Melle said. "Then everything that is happening inside the data center has to connect to other data centers and to the rest of the outside world. That's going to continue to drive even more growth in data center interconnection bandwidth."

To cope with the growing need for capacity, data center operators are eyeing the latest generations of CPUs and GPUs that are specifically optimized for AI workloads, like the processors Nvidia and AMD are introducing.

With increased compute power also comes increased power density of hardware, which "is putting a lot more pressure on data center operators around optimizing their cooling [and] their space allocation," Melle explained.

And "data centers are consuming ever more power in their networks," he added.

As a method of addressing data center capacity needs, power density and energy use, Melle touted Nokia's ability to launch new technologies for data center interconnection that reduce network power consumption "by significant amounts – not 10% gains," he said. "That's exactly what these new sixth-generation super-coherent optics enable."

Nokia's latest generation super-coherent photonic service engine (PSE-6s) "can reduce network power consumption [per bit] by up to 60% from the studies that we've done," Melle touted.

First announced at Mobile World Congress 2023, the PSE-6s targets efficient delivery of services like 800 gigabit ethernet across distances of more than 1,200 miles. The optical technology's network power reductions, Melle added, result in a multi-faceted "bottom line impact for the data center operators," he said.

Data center operators end up spending "less money on power, especially with [energy] costs going up, but at the same time it allows them to make their overall power consumption more efficient and ... meet some of their sustainability objectives," he said.