Passive Optical Network (PON)

Mon Jan 23 17:15:14 UTC 2017

In a message written on Sat, Jan 21, 2017 at 03:22:20PM -0600, Stas Bilder wrote:
> Now, to the projects.
> I have never heard of seen PON on a DC level.

A friend of mine told me of a fascinating in-data center PON solution.

He had a customer that needed high speed multicast fan-out.  They
chose to use a 10G/1G PON solution, a single source node sending
10G PON with a 1G backchannel, 100% of the traffic was multicast.
It could be passively split in DC up to 128:1 with zero "packet
loss", good luck finding an Ethernet switch which can take in 10G
of multicast in and turn it into 1280G of multicast out without
dropping a frame.  It was all done entirely inside of a single
data center.

Since then I've mentioned the trick to several other folks I know
who need high speed multicast/broadcast replication.  In the DC
distance is rarely an issue, so the solution degenerates to special
SFP's and a splitter, which is pretty dang simple.

However, this is clearly a corner case, and I agree with your
assessment overall.

-- 
Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org
PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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