The VPOD: Breakthrough Operational Efficiency Improvement For Data Centers

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Introducing the VPOD:

CALIENT Technologies, August 2015

Breakthrough Operational Efficiency Improvement For Data Centers

2 © 2015 CALIENT Technologies – All Rights Reserved

We Improve Data Center Operational Efficiency Reduced CAPEX & Improved Energy Efficiency

• Compute resources can be reallocated and shared at the optical layer, supporting much improved % utilization of server and storage assets. These represent 85% of the DC electronics cost and almost 70% of the energy consumption.

Reduced OPEX and Improved Customer Satisfaction• Automation of Fiber Infrastructure speeds new service provisioning, improves

customer satisfaction and retention, supports creation of new on-demand services, improves reliability, eliminates truck-rolls, and lowers workforce cost.

Enabling “Lights Out” Data Centers


Problem: Poor Compute Resource UtilizationThe biggest operational efficiency problem in Data Centers

Amortized Equipment Cost 1 Power Consumption 2

Sources: (1) James Hamilton, Amazon. (2) The Datacenter as a Computer, Luiz André Barroso, Jimmy Clidaras, Urs Hölzle (Google)

Compute Resources = 85% of Electronics Cost & 68% of Energy

Problem: Compute Resources are typically less than 40% utilized

Massive CAPEX & Energy Waste


Why Is Compute Resource Utilization Low? Large Data Centers are organized into Pods consisting of multiple racks,

and sharing a common spine switch. AKA “Stamps”, Clusters Favored for performance and maintenance reasons A large Data Center may have hundreds of PODS

The compute resources within the POD are very tightly coupled for optimum performance with very low latency connections.

Data Center Managers prefer to keep applications within a POD for optimum performance – Resources are typically not shared between PODS

However, compute resource demand requirements for specific applications fluctuates considerably based on time of day, instantaneous events, etc.

As a result, PODs are designed for worst-case (maximum) resource demand so they are considerably under-utilized for a large percentage of the time

How can resources be shared between PODs without sacrificing performance??


Introducing a Breakthrough Technology CALIENT’s S-Series 3D-MEMS Optical Circuit Switch (OCS)

Up to 320 User Ports – 640 Single Mode Fibers• 320x320, 160x160 options

10, 40, 100 Gbit/s per port and beyond <50ms Maximum Setup Time

Introduces The Ability to Optimize Resources at The Physical Layer

Less than 50ns latency Less than 3.5 dB Insertion Loss Ultra low power (<45w), small size (7RU) TL1, SNMP, OpenFlow APIs

Pure Optical-Layer Circuit Switching


Back To Our Problem….

How can we share resources between PODs to improve server and storage % utilization without sacrificing performance??


CALIENT’s LightConnect™ Switching FabricOCS-Enabled Virtual PODs (VPODs) Support Resource Sharing

Any resource (Rack, Row, Row Group) can be directly connected to any spine switch at Layer 1 = VPOD! VPOD always has tightly coupled low-latency resources regardless of size PODs can expand and contract with compute demand by sharing resources VPODs can be provisioned manually or in response to DC resource management tools

Compute Resources are physically shared between PODs in response to Application/Workload demands

CALIENT LightConnect™ Optical Switching Fabric

LightConnect™ Optical Fabric ManagerData Center Resource Management Tools/Systems


The power of the VPOD architecture is that it is not necessary to over-build every POD with compute resources to handle worst case anticipated demands. Instead, compute resources are shared and reallocated on demand between PODs at the optical layer without any loss of performance.

As a result, PODs can be operated at much greater capacity and operational efficiency and this translates directly to lower compute resource CAPEX and power consumption.


Economic Benefit of LightConnect™ FabricData Center Organized into Dynamic VPODs

A small increase in Server Utilization translates into a huge savings in total data center spending

Model assumes $2B in mega-scale data center spending• 85% of total electronic CAPEX is on

server resources• 15% of total electronic CAPEX is on

networking

A server utilization increase of less than 10% is equivalent to saving the total CAPEX of the entire data center network

Savings is in the $100Ms for a Mega-scale Data Center


LightConnect™ Fabric Manager Provides access to all of the OCS nodes that are part of the

flexible LightConnect Fabric topology. • Each VPOD with associated spine switch ports, and each compute

resource unit with associated ToR or end-of-row switch ports are defined in the LightConnect Fabric Manager topology and cross-connect management modules.

• Resource moves are made simply by connecting the resource to the appropriate VPOD with the Fabric Manager.

• In addition to pushing the OCS cross connect state to each of the OCS nodes, the Fabric Manager can trigger the push of configuration changes to the ToR, end-of-row, and spine switches.

Deployment Options:• Can be deployed as a stand-alone solution, allowing data center

operators to make changes to the fabric manually• Alternatively, the Fabric Manager can be integrated with existing

data center resource management systems via variety of open interfaces including TL1, REST, SNMP, or RPC


LightConnect™ Fabric ManagerSoftware Architecture


Further Benefits of Optical Network Automation Accelerate New Service revenue

• Provision in seconds instead of days• Create and reallocate capacity on demand• Enhance customer satisfaction and retention

Reduce Operational Expense• Reduce on-facility workforce and truck-rolls• Manage connections from a central offsite operations facility• Support automated entry and updating of facility electronic records

Improve Quality of Service • Minimize human-error scenarios• Accelerate fault detection and isolation during service degradations or outages


CALIENT Technologies at a Glance Headquarters in Santa Barbara, CA, U.S.A.

• Atiq Raza (Chairman and CEO) held former roles as CEO of RMI, President and COO of AMD, and CEO of NexGen• Dr. John Bowers (Co-Founder) is Director of the Institute for Energy Efficiency at University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB)

Optical Circuit Switching market leader. >$400M invested to develop & perfect core 3D MEMS optical technology 2013: Started shipping new S-Series Optical Circuit Switch in volume to one of the largest global cloud data centers

• The only Optical Circuit Switch shipping in high volume and tested to rigorous Telcordia GR63 & GR1073 requirements

Data Center applications focus on improving operational efficiency by increasing compute resource utilization High Growth: In 2015 CALIENT ships our entire 2012 volume every 2 weeks. Driven by Data Center shipments


Thank You