The typical telco central office (CO) uses a back-to-back rack layout that requires networking equipment to have front access and a depth of no more than 300mm but can accommodate any chassis-based system from 1RU up to a full bay of equipment. Telco COs also require DC power – a legacy of the copper plant days even though much of the cabling is now fiber-based – because it is still safer, more efficient and more reliable for telecom devices that run on DC power internally.
The data center is a different beast entirely. Data centers originally occupied space in commercial buildings alongside other, more traditional business tenants—law firms, insurance agencies, retail stores, etc. These buildings use AC power almost exclusively and as a result, server and switch vendors designed their equipment with AC power feeds in order to avoid the cost and space required for the extra equipment required to convert AC power to DC, and also to eliminate a potential point of failure. As data centers grew out of commercial buildings to their own dedicated spaces, they kept the AC power environment to avoid disrupting the entrenched eco-system of platform vendors and to face the huge electrical power needed by today giant data centers.
Space constraints also played a part in the evolution of data center equipment. With thousands and thousands of servers and switches, space is at a premium inside the data center so successive generations of equipment were designed to be deeper rather than taller to occupy fewer rack units and be more attractive to operators. This meant that the rack layouts had to be different than the telco model to accommodate the extra depth. Hot and cold aisles replaced the back-to-back racks and air flow had to run front-to-back rather than to the side as it does with telco-grade equipment. This re-arrangement also provides for rear access to the equipment meaning management interfaces could be moved to the back of the shelf to allow for more service ports on the front.
The introduction of ‘compact modular’ equipment with coherent optical technology has been the telco equipment vendor industry’s answer to adapting telco-grade equipment to data center requirements. As entirely new transport platforms, compact modular devices have different line interfaces and use different operating systems and management software than their telco counterparts which makes interoperability difficult when a service provider needs to extend service from a CO to a data center. In addition, IT Integration of the compact modular equipment into the data center requires the support of management interface whose requirements are different from the Telco IT requirements.
As a result, more and more compact modular units have been creeping their way into service provider networks but they require reconfiguration of the physical plant inside the CO to accommodate their form factor, airflow and AC power requirements. This can be costly, time-consuming and not terribly space efficient which can counteract the port density improvements compact modular provides.
While the market for compact modular will remain robust — market research firm Cignal AI forecasts it growing from approximately $4.7B in 2025 to over $7.1B by 2029 — not all service providers are ready, willing or able to introduce a new technology into their networks.
For them, a hybrid optical transport solution that addresses both CO and data center requirements and fits seamlessly in either environment could provide a more workable approach. The Ekinops C700HC is a chassis-based system in the standard 300mm depth used by telcos eliminating the need to reconfigure space but with front-to-back airflow so it can be deployed in the data center as well. Support for AC or DC power eliminates the need to have different solutions in different locations. Plus, the chassis supports all the same line cards as the existing Ekinops360 chassis and uses the same software and management tools so it is fully interoperable with existing infrastructure, minimizes sparing costs and is operationally familiar. For service providers that need to quickly and efficiently meet the service demand from their customers for direct connectivity to their Cloud and AI services, this hybrid approach simplifies the task of extending their existing networks from the CO to the data center using a single solution. And that is how you can be in both places at once.
