By Michael Ting Wang, P. Eng., Shaw Communications Inc.
The phenomenal growth in Cloud services is driving the need for higher bandwidth within data centres. To keep up with the global demand for higher bandwidth, data centre operators need an interconnect solution that is dense, economically efficient and secure.
Shaw Communications is an MSO in western Canada that serves approximately two million Internet customers. Our newest LEED Gold certified Calgary Data Centre is a densely populated facility which offers hyperscale Cloud services. The opening of this state-of-the-art facility required an upgrade to the legacy low-density DWDM systems, which no longer met the requirements of Cloud Interconnect.
This paper outlines the work to create a modular coherent Cloud Data Centre Interconnect (DCI), which is technically agile, superbly scalable, operationally simple and economically efficient. The insights described in this paper into the DCI analysis and actions are intended to help other MSOs to achieve significant benefits when undergoing a similar Data Centre DWDM Interconnect modernization program.