Data center performance improvement using optical wireless links

Data centers collect and process information with a capacity that has been increasing from year to year at an almost exponential pace, while many datacenter applications are provided at no cost. This faces datacenter operators with the challenges of meeting exponentially increasing demands for network bandwidth without unreasonable increases in operation and infrastructure cost. In order to meet the requirements of moderate increase in operation and infrastructure cost new technologies are desired. Optical wireless technology could a) reduce the power consumption, b) increase the flexibility and scalability and c) reduce the network overload. The OWC link could be deployed on top of the existing cable/fiber network layer, such that live migration could be done easily and dynamically and network topology is flexible and adapts quickly to changes in traffic, heat distribution, power consumption and characteristics of the applications. In addition, OWC could provide an easy way to maintains and scale up data centers which would reduce total cost of ownership and increase the return on investment. In this talk we will review the main OWC technologies, algorithms concepts and configurations which improve the performance of next generation data centers.