Everyone reading this has seen the movie Top Gun with Tom Cruise and heard the classic phrase, “The Need for Speed.”  Well, a desire for speed is not limited to Naval Aviators. People in federal technology may not have call signs but need to optimize communication speed between data centers.

If you were to stand in front of a whiteboard with a bunch of enterprise architects, they would dazzle you with CPU and GPU speeds. Memory tricks with virtualization give you tons of memory. However, at the end of the day, the real choking point is the connections between those stacks of silicon.

During today’s interview, Rob Shore from Infinera unpacked how optical speeds have drastically changed over the years. Today’s speeds allow for transmittal of 1.2 Terabits per second. That makes the speed of your home wi-fi look like a bicycle racing a Maserati.

The conversation took a fascinating twist. While everybody is debating the methods of data collection for artificial intelligence, systems engineers are worrying about the hardware being able to “catch up” to the speed demands that, for example, driverless cars demand.

At the end of the conversation, Rob talks about applying the concepts for fast optical cable to inside the data center. Same principles, a need for speed between servers and routers inside a data center as well as between data centers.

You can watch the short video starring Rob Shore that explains one technical aspect of technology, coherent optics.

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