Cisco Cisco 40 Gigabit Modules White Paper
© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Page 1 of 3
White Paper
Top Five Things to Know about Cisco BiDi Optical
Technology
Technology
Upgrade to 40-Gbps Performance Today without Rewiring the Access Layer
Walk past your data center, and you might hear a soft, plaintive call: “Feed me, feed me…” It is not your engineers
demanding more pizza. It is your servers and applications. And the call is growing louder.
Mobile and virtualized workloads, cloud applications, big data, heterogeneous devices: they are all growing in your
organization, demanding previously unimagined capacity and performance from your servers and data center
fabric. And that demand is not slacking. Your employees, applications, and competitive advantage increasingly
depend on it. Those servers and applications need to be fed. And if you have not started planning for 40 gigabits
per second (Gbps) to the server rack, you will need to soon.
New Cisco
®
40-Gbps bidirectional (BiDi) optical technology lets you bring 40-Gbps speeds to the access layer
using the same 10-Gbps cable plant you are using today. It is a huge cost savings, whether you are upgrading your
current data center or building a new one. And it means you can start taking advantage of 40-Gbps performance
for your organization right now without needing special budget approval and without having to wait a year to get the
capacity you need.
An Urgent Need for Capacity
Supporting your organization is a very different game than it was a decade ago. Today’s data centers have to
contend with:
●
A proliferation of new devices: Cisco Consulting Services
triple the number of devices generating traffic on IP networks. All told, there will be 50 billion smart devices
connecting to global networks by 2020.
●
Huge traffic growth as a result of new devices and big data: The
that data center traffic will quadruple over the next five years, and global cloud IP traffic will grow sixfold.
●
Growing reliance on distributed databases and applications: Fully 80 percent of enterprise applications
are delivered as a service today, and that figure is likely to grow.
●
Increasing virtualization and virtual machine density: To provide the flexible capacity and scale they
need, organizations are using more virtual machines per server: now 11 per server on average, according
. This creates a pressing need for greater I/O performance
from each rack.
●
More complex and unpredictable traffic flows: Traditional data centers were designed primarily for north-
south traffic. But the growth of mobile workloads, cloud applications, and big data means that 76 percent of
traffic now flows east-west within the data center, promoting the need to move more data, more quickly.