As discussed in Part 1, we’ve seen that the Data Center Interconnect market has grown - and continues to grow - exponentially on account of a host of reasons including the rollout of 5G technology, rise in OTT viewership and overall adoption of cloud-based services by businesses & enterprises, especially post the Covid-19 pandemic. In this blog, we will discuss some of the key trends and challenges in the Data Center Interconnect Market.

According to recent studies by the leading US-based market vendor, Ciena Corporation, the number of Data Centers has surged to over 7500 globally, with over 2600 of these centers based in the top 20 global cities. As per a report by Huawei, the total volume of data produced annually across the world may touch 180 ZB by 2025. Similarly, the proportion of unstructured data which includes raw footage, image and voice recordings will continue to swell, driving the growth of Data Centers globally. 

The Key Trends in the Data Center Interconnect (DCI) Market:

The significant priorities for Data Center vendors include factors such as throughput, intelligence, security, latency, simplified operations and maintenance. The increasing adoption of Data Center Interconnect (DCI) Technology is resulting in increasing bandwidth between data centers, and a corresponding drop in latency and reduction in packet loss. 

Today around 10-15% data is created and processed outside a Centralized Data Center or Cloud. However, the amount of data expected to be created on the Cloud will rise to 60-70% by 2025. 

The Hyperscale data centers of Amazon, Google, Equinix and DRT are interconnected and stream data & applications over the network to the end user.

According to research, almost 95% of the data workloads are expected to be hosted on the Cloud by 2025, which will be a huge increase from 30% in 2021. 

By 2025, over 95% companies will utilize cloud computing to take advantage of flexibility, scalability and cost savings as compared to the conventional on-premises hosting. In fact, businesses can reduce 15-40% infrastructure costs by switching to cloud-based solutions. 

The Key Challenges faced by the Data Center Interconnect (DCI) Market:

One of the major challenges for small and medium-sized enterprises is the cost of data center connectivity services. 

The distance between data centers is important since it could affect the efficiency of the data center, thereby limiting the growth of the Data Center Interconnect (DCI) industry.

One of the critical goals for businesses today is ensuring seamless connectivity 24/7. On the other hand, the traffic flowing between data centers has expanded, resulting in increased latency.

The significant rise in OTT viewership and social media is resulting in enormous size of datasets entering or leaving a data center. This poses significant capacity planning and network engineering challenges for data center operators. 

With the rise of generative AI, machine learning, real time analytics and IoT, the workloads of 100s of GB to TB of data generated by these technologies are putting tremendous strain on the capacity of the Data centers.

How Lightstorm is overcoming the challenges faced by the Data Center Interconnect industry

Here are some of the technological innovations and achievements by Lightstorm to overcome the challenges faced by the DCI industry:

• Point-to-point links with leaf and spine network architecture that minimize hops, resulting in 30% lower latency vis-a-vis competitors.

• Longest NLD route without a regeneration point, spanning 1700 km from Delhi to Mumbai, a first-of-its-kind implementation globally.

• Introduction of C+L band electronics on a protected ring architecture, connecting South and West India—a first in the enterprise data connectivity domain.

• Lightstorm’s 2 state-of-the-art Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are designed with Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) for Layer 1 service along with Single Pane of Glass to view Service Performance Metrics like online latency monitoring, real-time flap measurement, & real-time passive infra monitoring

• Lightstorm's extensive network also comprises three International Long Distance (ILD) pops, and over 300 nodes across India.

Despite the rising number of viewers consuming content on OTT channels, Lightstorm ensures seamless connectivity for an immersive viewing experience thanks to data center interconnect and cloud interconnect services and multi cloud solutions.