As I mentioned in my previous blog, pluggable optics (aka optical transceivers) are widely deployed inside the data center, campus, enterprise, or service provider central office. The Cisco Global Cloud Index estimates that total data center traffic (all traffic within or exiting a data center) will reach almost 20 zettabytes per year by 2021, up from 7 zettabytes in 2016. Data center traffic on a global scale will grow at a 25 percent CAGR, with cloud data center traffic growth rate at 27 percent CAGR or 3.3-fold growth from 2016 to 2021.

Network connectivity speeds continue to increase to facilitate this growth in traffic as we see migration from 10G to 40G to 100G and now 400G. Today, 100G pluggable optics are deployed in large scale data center applications, with plans for 400G migration as router/switch ports now support 400G.

The growth in