Energy Consumption of Hybrid Data Center Networks

Existing data center networks (DCNs) based on only electronic packet or all-optical switching still pose an exponential increase in power consumption and cost due to the current high demand for digital data and sustainability issues. The recent development of hybrid DCN prototypes is a promising solution offering relatively higher data throughput, low latency, reduction in cost and energy consumption. This paper explores the frontier of hybrid DCN with a special focus on energy consumption and cost. We evaluate the energy consumption per bit and the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission per year of three hybrid switching systems as compared with an optical point to point (ptp) network, results show that the hybrid switching systems will consume less energy per bit and are likely to emit less GHG annually. We present feasibility analysis on the energy consumption and cost of some hybrid DCN prototypes. Evaluation results show that Helios-like and Hybrid Optical Switching-like prototypes achieve a power usage effectiveness (PUE) value lower than 1.2, an index which represents a very efficient level of energy performance in a data center network.