According to Stijn Grove, director of the Dutch Datacenter Association, the world is about to change radically. The internet of things is upon us, putting pressure on data storage and processing to shoulder the growth. Integrated Photonics could be the solution to the problem.
The internet has exploded in the past 5 years. Phones, cars, household appliances, hospitals and a host of other “things” are moving into cyberspace. All of these depend on fibers, datacenters and internet exchanges to keep them up and running. With 2 of the 5 biggest datacenter internet exchanges in the world The Netherlands is at the heart of the global internet infrastructure.
On September 27th Stijn Grove gave a keynote at the Integrated Photonics Conference at High Tech Campus Eindhoven about the challenges and opportunities this growing internet infrastructure provides. We spoke to Stijn before his presentation.
What do you mean when you talk about this changing new world? “There are many examples. Because everybody banks online, bank branches are disappearing, which has made banks become more like IT companies. Hospitals have discovered the internet and are storing medical records online. That offers possibilities to diagnose disease much earlier. With self-driving cars around the corner, in the future everyone will have their own private digital chauffeur. Yet all these developments are depending on datacenters.”
What is the answer to the increasing pressure for more bandwidth? Do we need better technology or more datacenters? “I think it’s both. Around the digital mainport of Amsterdam datacenters have doubled in size, having grown with 15% each year over the past five years. There is a continuous need to build more datacenters. At the same time the efficiency has increased through better technology, especially in the field of chips. If we still had to rely on the technology we had five years ago, we would need twice as many datacenters.”
What role does Integrated Photonics play in the future of datacenters? “I think the impact of photonics will be big. It’s one of the disruptive technologies that will enable the transition into the new data driven society. And it also helps to solve environmental issues. Datacenters need cooling, because copper internet cables generate heat. Photonics works with light, which generates much less heat.”
