Silicon Photonics

Chapter 6

The Data Center

A Central Cog in the Digital Economy

Abstract

The Internet content providers, still young companies, have annual revenues in the tens of billions of dollars. Their profits are generated using data centers that deliver services over the Internet. Not surprisingly, telecom operators and enterprises are keen to adopt such practices to grow their own revenues. The Internet content providers own multiple large-scale data centers, each housing more than 100,000 servers, and they are building more, even larger ones. Scaling data centers is needed for the Internet players to continue to grow their businesses and deliver new, bandwidth-hungry services such as video. But such scaling is challenging: data centers are becoming costlier ...