Research teams from CornellUniversity and Microsoft are setting forth a proposal for building data centers without wires or cables. “Conventional data centers, based on wired networks, entail high wiring costs, suffer from performance bottlenecks, and have low resilience to network failures,” the researchers say. Instead, they propose a new methodology for building wire-free data centers based on emerging 60GHz RF technology. Ultimately, they claim, wireless data centers can deliver “higher aggregate bandwidth, lower latency, and substantially higher fault tolerance than a conventional wired datacenter while improving ease of construction and maintenance.” Interestingly, the proposal draws upon schematics laid out in a paper written in 1889 by mathematician Arthur Cayley.
The paper is available from Cornell's website.