Moderated by NTT New Ventures & Innovation Group VP Rika Nakazawa, the Upgrade 2024 track titled “IOWN and the Internet of Light” included two sessions devoted to NTT’s Innovative Optical & Wireless Network (IOWN) and three sessions focused on emerging photonic technologies. We will summarize the IOWN sessions in this article and the others in a follow-up. The first of the IOWN sessions featured a conversation between NTT Global Chief Marketing Officer Vito Mabrucco and NTT VP, IOWN Development Office, Yosuke Aragane about IOWN use cases, as well as the IOWN Global Forum.
The IOWN Global Forum, comprised of 130 member companies, has created formal use cases that combine technical requirements and desired business outcomes. Mabrucco and Aragane drilled down into several, including remote maintenance in chemical factories. “One of the very big issues [the factories] have is the lack of human resources,” Aragane said, adding that the specialists they do have end up spending much of their time in planes, traveling from one plant (and dangerous work environment) to another. Enter remote controls powered by IOWN’s high-throughput, low-latency, low-jitter network. “This is about remote drones and remote robots being centrally controlled with highly skilled people using an IOWN-based network that is able to operate in severe environments,” Mabrucco said. “It now changes the mechanics and the cost of managing these very large plants.”
Another use case they discussed involves the financial services industry. NTT is working with a multinational bank with a main site in Tokyo and recovery site 500 km away in Osaka. Common to the industry, this bank’s challenge is to continuously serve clients while maintaining up-to-date versions of data, despite IT accidents, failures or disaster. “Mean recovery time … is very, very important,” Aragane said. The bank is looking at IOWN technology to transmit data and migrate virtual machines between these two sites in real time. “I can see how this would become a kind of standard in the banking industry, using IOWN-based APN (all-photonics network) to help with disaster recovery,” Mabrucco said.
Media production and GenAI training were two final cases addressed in this session. The workflow for media production of local events has traditionally demanded onsite production equipment and personnel. Using an IOWN network for real-time transmission of video to remote production sites, however, reverses this model, gaining efficiencies in the process. “Skilled people can handle several baseball games in several different stadiums at once,” Aragane said. As for GenAI training, poised to become an energy-intensive industry in itself, NTT has collaborated with NVIDIA and Red Hat on a real-time AI data analysis solution at the edge that has received IOWN Global Forum proof-of-concept (PoC) recognition. “You’re able to keep the data in one place,” Mabrucco said, “but do the GPU processing in a high-performance, GPU-specialized green data center, maybe closer to renewables.”
The second session on IOWN addressed a dilemma facing data centers. “Due to the large amount of power consumption and land shortages, it has become difficult to build a new data center in urban areas,” NTT IOWN Development Office Director Katsushi Shindo said. “[Thus] forcing the customer to data centers in the suburbs.” Connecting such facilities has traditionally implied a cost in performance. Recently released results of a trial in the U.K., however, show that IOWN’s APN components have enabled two data centers about 100 km apart to exhibit less than 1 millisecond of round-trip delay. In effect, the APN transformed geographically distributed IT infrastructure into the functional equivalent of a single data center.
All-photonic infrastructure delivers performance and cost benefits. Conventional networks require conversion of optical signals to electrical signals (and back again), which leads to unavoidable latency problems. The APN eliminates those conversions, along with the need for expensive, full-function equipment at each location. NTT DATA Executive Manager Marco Provolo compared the APN design to a direct airline flight, without time-intensive layovers. He said the APN trial in the U.K. also demonstrated exceptionally low jitter, or fluctuation of delay and that such performance would appeal to banks that have tended to avoid managed services from hyperscalers and remote data centers in favor of on-premises facilities in their basements.
The APN’s breakthrough results, which approach the limit of maximum possible speeds, should lead to a re-thinking of conventional infrastructure. “You have data, you have GPU, today you tend to have all those things in the same place,” Provolo said. “Now it looks reasonable to imagine that we can distribute load, computing, power, data and processing.” Realizing this vision involves “incremental steps” rather than a “big bang,” he said, adding that NTT would be delivering and deploying a range of related and unique solutions in the coming years.