Fujitsu today receives the Intel Innovation Award for its pioneering new concept in data centre technology. The ceremony takes place at 10am in the Intel Pavilion P37, Nord / LB forum at CeBIT. The award will be accepted by Jens-Peter Seick, senior VP, Product Development Group, Fujitsu.
Silicon Photonics Technology delivers data at the speed of light, removing performance bottlenecks and enabling real-time business at full speed. By using fibre-optic cables, data throughput speeds are increased to light speed, at rates of up to 1,6Tbps (Terabits per second, enough to fill an entire 1Tb hard drive in just five seconds).
The technology promises to significantly reshape the data centre of the future, since it has the potential to remove physical limitations from data centre design. Because data can be transferred over distances up to 300m without any performance degradation, new data centre designs can be optimised.
Network, storage and compute nodes can be decoupled, and processing units, which generate the most heat, can then be optimally cooled without having to also use heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) resources to cool more passive components such as storage and network.
Silicon Photonics will also make it easier to connect new server nodes or storage systems, as these can be positioned in external racks and connected via fibre optic cables to the server core.
Developed jointly by Fujitsu and Intel, Silicon Photonics Technology was shown for the first time outside the laboratories in November 2013, at the Fujitsu Forum event in Munich, Germany.
“For Fujitsu it is a great honour to receive the Intel Innovation Award and also an incentive to continue to work together with Intel on developing new technologies for the data centre. Silicon-based photonics has the potential to redefine the role of data centres, as service-oriented providers of sheet computing power for organizations conducting real time business.
“By separating server and storage components we are taking an important step towards increasing the efficiency of data centres and giving customers a new competitive edge in realtime business,” says Jens-Peter Seick, Senior Vice President Product Development Group, Fujitsu.
“With the world’s first server solution based on Intel Silicon Photonics Technology, Fujitsu impressively demonstrated that it is possible to achieve a massive increase in performance with the help of an innovative system design in the data centre,” says Christian Lamprechter, MD Intel and country manager of Germany and Austria.
“In addition, the proof of concept shows how bottlenecks in server and storage performance can be eliminated thanks to innovative approaches. Intel and Fujitsu have laid the foundation for the data centre of the future. With the Intel Innovation Award, we recognize this outstanding achievement.”