{"id":23402,"date":"2025-08-07T09:50:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-07T08:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/interface.media\/?p=23402"},"modified":"2025-08-01T11:51:46","modified_gmt":"2025-08-01T10:51:46","slug":"we-need-to-talk-about-switchingthe-missing-link-in-data-centre-efficiency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/interface.media\/blog\/2025\/08\/07\/we-need-to-talk-about-switchingthe-missing-link-in-data-centre-efficiency\/","title":{"rendered":"We need to talk about switching\u2026the missing link in data centre efficiency"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The data centre industry has spent years fine-tuning how it refers to power and cooling. It has become normal to talk about it in terms of efficiency, power usage effectiveness (PUE) and how to make facilities cleaner, faster and more scalable. But there’s one part of the infrastructure conversation that still doesn\u2019t get the attention it deserves. The network switch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This might sound like a niche concern, but in today\u2019s IT infrastructure environment where workloads are growing more complex and unpredictable, switching is no longer a background function. It’s becoming a make-or-break component of how well a data centre performs, and how efficiently it can scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why switches matter more than acknowledged<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

According to Exploding Topics<\/a>, approximately 402.74 million terabytes of data are created each day, and 181 zettabytes of data is expected to be generated in 2025. This data is moving inside a data centre between storage arrays, compute nodes, graphics processing unit (GPU) clusters and virtual machines. Every bit of that data needs to go through a switch to get from one place to another. In a typical setup, switches convert those signals from light to electricity. They use this to make a routing decision, and then convert back to light for onward transmission.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although this might not sound like much, it\u2019s happening millions of times per second, across thousands of connections. And, of course, all that switching uses energy, and all that energy produces heat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the facility is running dense AI workloads, supporting financial services, or delivering real-time analytics, the volume and speed of data movement explodes. That puts pressure not only on the compute and storage layers, but also on the network. And if the switches can\u2019t keep up without drawing huge amounts of power and generating excess heat, everything downstream, especially cooling, gets more expensive and more difficult to manage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The hidden energy cost of switching<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s surprising is just how significant switching can be when it comes to overall energy use. In many high-performance environments, the power consumed by traditional switches is now becoming a meaningful percentage of the site\u2019s total energy budget. According to NVIDIA<\/a>, switching in data centres handling dynamic AI workloads typically makes up 8% of energy consumption. It\u2019s not something that used to be a concern. But, as rack densities climb and data centres try to push more performance per square foot, any and all inefficiencies at the network layer start to add up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An added challenge of switches is that the heat they generate doesn\u2019t just vanish, it has to be removed making the cooling system work harder. This in turn draws more power and becomes a cycle that chips away at efficiency goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A different way to move data<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

This is where optical switching can make a difference. Rather than converting data back and forth between light and electricity, optical switches keep it in the light domain for the whole journey with no unnecessary conversions, no extra heat, and dramatically lower energy consumption.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One company working on this challenge is UK innovator Finchetto<\/a>. The company has developed an all-optical, packet-level switch that can be deployed directly in the rack. Unlike traditional switches, it doesn\u2019t need power to make switching decisions. It just routes data using light alone. That means lower power draw, lower latency and less heat for the cooling system to deal with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The implications go beyond performance. If switches generate less heat, cooling strategies can be designed around higher-density loads. Airflow can be simplified, and racks can be packed closer together. In other words, smarter switching has a knock-on effect on every other part of the infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n

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From pain point to performance gain<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

By no means is switching suddenly the only thing that matters. However, it\u2019s part of a larger pattern that is evolving across the industry. As the demands on data centres evolve, power, cooling, and connectivity cannot be considered in isolation – they\u2019re all connected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When a switch becomes more efficient, it reduces the burden on power. That makes backup provisioning simpler, and it eases demand on the cooling system, which might allow heat reuse. It also improves the performance of AI clusters or other latency-sensitive applications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Switching used to be something that was optimised at the margins. Now it\u2019s something that needs to be designed around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Making new tech deployable in the real world<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Of course, no operator wants to rip out and replace the network fabric just because something better has come along. That\u2019s why the best switching innovations are the ones that fit into what\u2019s already there. For example: those that work with standard protocols and can be dropped into existing spine-and-leaf topologies without rewriting the whole network map.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This allows for gradual adoption, first deploying high-intensity pods or test environments and then building out from there. There is no need to choose between innovation and reliability \u2013 both can be achieved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Switching as part of the sustainability toolkit<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Sustainability remains a top priority for the industry. It\u2019s driving procurement decisions, investor expectations, and regulatory frameworks. And while much of the focus is still on renewable energy and PUE, there\u2019s a growing realisation that efficiency starts with smart design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By cutting energy use at the switching layer, and reducing the amount of waste heat produced, operators can improve their environmental performance without compromising capability. And unlike some sustainability measures, switching improvements don\u2019t require major behavioural change or offsets. They\u2019re architectural, they\u2019re measurable, and importantly, they can be planned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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