Business at the speed of light, Masahisa Kawashima, IOWN Technology Director, NTT

By Vriti Gothi

The Innovative Optical and Wireless Network Global Forum (the IOWN Global Forum) is leading the development of pioneering technology that replaces electronics with photonics to transfer vast quantities of data at speeds previously considered impossible.

Masahisa Kawashíma has been working as a bridge between technologies and businesses since he joined NTT in 1994. His expertise includes high-speed networking, SDN, cloud/edge computing, AI, and data management. He is exploring innovative ways of making products/services cloud-native, leveraging the evolution of optical communication and optoelectronics integration technologies.

What does the coming of photonics mean for financial services? How will these next generation networks change how financial services operate?

“IOWN is a new network that enables financial services institutions to build a next generation service platform for their businesses in an AI and data-driven world. In particular, the banks would need to maintain their data with much more reliability. And IOWN technology will allow financial services institutions highly reliable database and storage [solutions] with multiple data centres interconnected with high bandwidth, low latency interconnection.

“And in addition, for their businesses in the future AI and datadriven world, they may like to add data analysis capabilities such as AI computing. IOWN infrastructure will allow banks to connect AI computing resources to their service platforms with high bandwidth, low latency connections.”

Data centres are power hungry. What are you working on that can reduce or manage power consumption?

“So, typically, today’s data centres are located in urban downtown areas because the financial districts are in urban downtown. This is the area where we would like to reduce power consumption. We would like to deploy new data centres in suburban areas or rural areas where power is abundant and, sometimes, we can take advantage of renewable energy in such areas.

“What IOWN will do is to allow customers to deploy new data centres in such areas and connect those data centres to their existing data centres or their existing offices with high bandwidth and low latency connections. With this approach, the banks will be able to manage the power consumption of data centres, or, I would say, the carbon emissions of data centres.

“When we talk about the power consumption issue of data centres, one of the very important points is to reduce the density of power demand per area. If we use, if we concentrate data centres in urban downtown, the density of power demand in such areas will be very high. But if we could deploy data centres to many areas, including rural and suburban areas, then the power demand density per area can be kept very low. And that would help us take advantage of renewable energy. So, this is how IOWN contributes to the power consumption issue or carbon emission issue of data centres.”

Do photonics-based networks also have a role to play in sustainability as well?

“Yes, photonic technology itself can reduce the power consumption of the infrastructure. Sending data over the electronic wire means sending data against resistance. The electronic wire is a medium with high resistance.  On the other hand, sending the data over fibre is like moving over the air rather than moving over the surface. So, we can reduce the energy consumption of data transmission. What we’re looking at for the future is a more efficient, faster data transmission because we’re using photonics technology rather than copper wire technology, simplistically speaking.”

Do we have improved disaster recovery, improved operational resiliency, improved business continuity between these new data centres and the cloud, and of course more security?

“In future, one of the most important security capabilities is to be able analyse vast amount of transaction logs. With this architecture, the banks will be able to utilise AI computing resources to analyse the disks from the transaction logs. This is one example of how IOWN contributes to the security of the future financial services business.”

When do we see large-scale implementation? What timescale is that going to happen on?

“We have started demonstrating the feasibility of our IOWN infrastructure. I think we need to prove that the technology is operable for many people in the industry. It takes time to prove the commercial operability of the technology. So, it would take a few years before we will see the large-scale deployment of ION-based data centre infrastructure.”