Juniper is getting serious about silicon photonics. The company already had hundreds of patents in the area, and a clear interest in making itself a presence in the space. Now, they’ve formed a separate company with Synopsys, which will contain Juniper’s silicon photonics technology and leverage it across a wide range of applications. Networking is obviously one such application, and perhaps in more dimensions than we think.
Silicon photonics (SiPh) is a chip technology that substitutes photons for electrons in moving information. In theory, it can create chips that are more powerful but consume less power and so dissipate less heat, making them more efficient both in terms of facility costs but also in terms of the environment. It can also increase the speed of interconnect for network devices, and facilitate the coupling of chips to fiber for longer-haul transport. Intel is probably the most-recognized name in SiPh, and it’s a part of the company’s data center initiatives. In public cloud and other “hyperscaler” resource pools, SiPh could be critical.
For over three years, Juniper has touted a “second-generation” vision of SiPh, where lasers could be put directly onto the chip and drive external fiber, something called “co-packaged optics”. It can lift the capacity of a fiber connection to a network device up into the terabits, which would certainly be an advance, but I think there may be other network benefits that might be even more significant, relating to the metro-mesh model of future networks that I’ve blogged about.
When you route packets, you need to worry about specific destinations when you’re close to the edge, because that’s where those destinations connect. As you get deeper into the network, you’re really not routing destination addresses but subnet addresses, aggregated flows. In MPLS networking, the MPLS LSPs make this aggregate-routing explicit. While the core traffic flows over optical fibers, the routing process remains electrical because we can’t directly route optical flows.
With SiPh, that could change. Imagine a chip with multiple optical transceivers, capable of “reading” an MPLS header and making a routing decision. This multiplicity of connections could be a technical challenge for today’s devices, but we could imagine each fiber trunk terminating in a chip that did nothing but pull off “local” traffic from an optical flow. The rest of the stuff would proceed onward, with a lot less handling delay than we’d see in today’s networks.
The value of this sort of thing in metro-mesh applications is clear, but it would also be highly valuable in the metro network itself, because it could be the key to injecting hosted features into communications services, as well as in supporting edge computing applications. The metro site is the optimum place to couple hosted and connectivity features because it’s deep enough to be efficient in terms of users served, and shallow enough for some personalization to be possible.
It’s easy to see how this sort of thing could be valuable for Juniper in realizing their “Cloud Metro” vision. SiPh could transform the concept from a label for a collection of technologies that’s already in play, to something totally new and potentially revolutionary. It would link well to their Apstra data center stuff, not only in metro applications but in general. Data centers, after all, have an enormous amount of traffic to handle and need an effective on/off-ramp to the network, whatever “the network” might be.
There are other applications of SiPh that might be interesting to Juniper, too. It’s already been used to create large-scale neural networks and it’s obvious that SiPh could accelerate other complex AI applications, even be used to create an “AI engine”, a form of server that would be tuned to support AI in multiple forms. In mixed AI/IoT applications in particular, something like this could be the difference between a proof-of-concept implementation and a practical real-world system.
A final value proposition for a Juniper SiPh strategy is the effects of the shift toward optical networking on the competitive landscape. Electrical and optical vendors are increasingly fighting for budget, and the optical people have a fundamental advantage in that their stuff is essential in transporting information. Creating a model for metro meshing and metro feature injection, combining data center and WAN, would be a powerful competitive response for a router vendor. It’s probably at least one reason why Juniper got into SiPh to start with.
Why the venture, then? I think the main reason is that the space is just too specialized, and moving too fast, for Juniper to be assured their own efforts would keep up with market opportunities. Cisco also has pluggable SiPh elements in its portfolio, and while Cisco doesn’t normally attempt to lead the market, they certainly make playing it safe a lot more risky. One could even argue that they make playing it safe downright dangerous.
Cisco is the incumbent in router networks, they have their own server line, and they’re clearly taking more interest in the hosting side of the business. The scope of what Cisco could do in the data center is so broad that Juniper couldn’t hope to match it quickly enough to be credible, if the future of services does in fact involve the partnership between connectivity and hosted features. However, they’ve been far from innovative or revolutionary in their data center stuff. Attacking on a narrower front, through the SiPh metro mission, might be the best way to beat them.
Revolution in the making? An important point to remember in all of this is that technology revolutions are rooted in opportunity, not in technology. There are conditions that point to a transformation of networking, but whether those conditions will all develop and how the transformation they drive will unfold is still an open question. Right now, the biggest challenge SiPh may face is the same that many vendors face, the PR. The articles on SiPh range from obtuse to totally vapid, and that makes it difficult for the technology to stimulate interest among planners. Will simply saying the magic words (well, letters) make SiPh a reality? Hardly. Again, we’re probably going to have to wait for somebody to step up.
That’s why the Juniper/Synopsys deal might be important. It’s a change in the business processes driving at least a piece of SiPh, and those kinds of changes are what opens the market up to broader changes in technology, and network direction.
