The network technology deployed in ICP data centers has been upgraded from 10G to 400G in the past five years.
With the growth of demand for data centers and cloud computing resources, it has driven the development of super-large-scale public cloud data centers. The continuous increase in global data traffic has prompted the development of data centers from 100G optical transceiver to higher speeds, larger bandwidths, and lower latency. 400G transceiver market will be the direction of the next-generation backbone network upgrade and new construction, and it will become an inevitable trend for data centers. And 400G optical transceiver plays a vital role in the process of building a 400G network system.
1>Increase the bandwidth of the data center and storage capacity;
2>Increase the access speed of each port from 25G to 100G;
3>Improve the power efficiency but reduce the cost.
The 400G optical module plays an important role in building a 400 Gbit/s network system. The 400G optical module improves the data throughput and maximizes the bandwidth and port density of the data center. The future trend of 400G optical modules is to achieve wide gain, low noise, miniaturization, and integration. Under the current market background, the 400G transceiver market has become the best choice for large data centers to improve system performance and reduce bandwidth costs.
1>The power consumption has increased nearly three times since speed has increased four times compared with 100G optical trasnceivers. But there's no way to reduce it and heat dissipation for now.
2>The price is three times than the sum of the prices of four 100G optical transceivers.
The 400G transceiver is mainly used for photoelectric conversion. Electrical signals are converted into optical signals at the transmitter end and then transmitted through optical fibers. Optical signals are converted into electrical signals at the receiver end.
QSFP-DD: (Quad Small Form Factor Pluggable-Double Density) four-channel Small Pluggable package is a high-speed Pluggable module package defined by QSFP-DD MSA team, which is the first choice for 400G optical module package. Enable data centers to effectively grow and scale cloud capacity as needed.
OSFP: the full name is Octal Small Formfactor Pluggable, Octal refers to 8, Octal meaning, also means to directly use 56G electrical signal, 856GbE, but the 56GbE signal is formed by 25G DML laser under PAM4 modulation. Is a new pluggable package with eight high-speed electrical channels that will initially support 400Gb/s(8x50G). The volume of OSFP is more than twice that of QSFP-DD.
CFP8: CFP8 and QSFP-DD maximum bandwidth is 400Gb/s, but CFP8 only supports 400Gb/s(16x25G or 8x50G), while QSFP-DD supports 200Gb/s(8x25G) and 400Gb/s(8x50G).
With the growth of data volume, data centre optical module market demand is strong, 40G and 100G are gradually widely used, 400g optical transceiver is gradually improved and standardized, research and development of mass production speed up. 400G Ethernet (IEEE 802.3bs) was approved as early as December 2017. In this standard, new technologies such as forward error correction (FEC) are regulated to improve error code performance and increase the reliability of data communication. Currently, there are 400G switches in the market, such as Cisco 400g transceiver, Arista 400G 7060X4 series, Mellanox Spectrum-2, etc.
The 400G connection scheme is also booming, such as 400G DAC and 400G optical module (including 400G QSFP-DD optical module, 400G OSFP optical module, 400G CFP8 optical module, etc.). Among them, QSFP-DD is expected to become the most popular 400G package with its advantages of high density and low power consumption. With the standardization, commercialization and scale development of 400G Ethernet, the 400G product system will be gradually improved soon, and there will be more 400G products on the transceiver market.
Over the past five years, we've seen opportunities with the rise of 100g optical transceivers, and in the last two years, the market has refocused on 400g optical transceiver. From the demand of Google and other leading manufacturers, 400g transceiver market is expected to enter the golden period in a short time.
