As the data centre industry grapples with rising complexity and regulatory scrutiny, Darren Watkins, Chief Revenue Officer at VIRTUS Data Centres, argues that the network itself remains a critical, yet largely overlooked, part of the conversation. Amidst the focus on power, cooling, and chip performance, the network will be key to meeting the seamless performance and sustainability demands of the future.
The data centre industry is entering a new phase of complexity. Power consumption is under the microscope, regulatory scrutiny is rising, and customers expect performance to scale seamlessly alongside sustainability. Yet amid all the talk of cooling innovations, power efficiency, and chip performance, one critical part of the infrastructure conversation remains largely neglected – the network itself.
If you ask most data centre teams where the pressure points are, they’ll talk about rising rack densities, the grid connection backlog or the struggle to meet emissions targets. But dig a little deeper and it becomes clear that how data moves inside the facility is now just as important as how the facility is powered or cooled. And that starts with switching.
The invisible middle layer
Network switches are foundational to every function inside a modern data centre. They don’t just connect systems together, they control the flow of information between every server, node, and cluster. But they are also one of the least evolved components of the infrastructure stack.
In traditional deployments, switches operate by converting data signals back and forth between light and electricity. This optoelectronic process, repeated millions of times per second, adds a hidden energy cost to every transaction. It also generates heat, which pushes up cooling demands and limits how densely systems can be deployed.
For most of the last decade, that overhead was considered tolerable, but with the surge in data-intensive applications like AI training, real-time analytics, and high-performance computing, the switch is becoming a point of friction.
Switches that scale, not stall
What’s changed is not just the amount of data, but the behaviour of the workloads. Modern applications no longer fit neatly into predictable traffic patterns. They spike, fluctuate, and require massive east-west data movement across clusters. This puts immense stress on network infrastructure, revealing inefficiencies that used to stay hidden.
Conventional switches, designed for less dynamic environments, are now struggling to keep up. They draw more power, produce more heat, and in some cases, cap overall performance. This is a challenge not just for network teams, but for facilities managers and infrastructure leaders trying to hit energy and emissions targets without compromising capacity.
A quiet breakthrough: switching with light
One emerging solution is optical switching – a technology that routes data entirely in the optical domain, eliminating the constant need to convert signals into electricity and back again.
This may sound like a niche upgrade, but the implications are broad. By switching data with light alone, power consumption and latency are reduced. Crucially, heat generation drops as well, lightening the load on cooling systems and creating space for denser, more efficient layouts.
A UK-based innovator, Finchetto, has taken this a step further. It has developed a fully passive, packet-level optical switch that can operate inside the rack. This not only reduces energy use but also integrates directly into existing data centre topologies. Unlike previous generations of optical technology, it’s not just about backbone optimisation – it’s built for everyday infrastructure.
Cooling and switching: two sides of the same coin
From an infrastructure perspective, what makes this innovation compelling is how it interacts with other systems.
Operators are already investing heavily in advanced cooling – direct-to-chip liquid cooling, rear-door heat exchangers, and even immersion. But these systems often work harder than necessary to compensate for upstream inefficiencies. By reducing the heat at its source – namely, the switch – data centres can unlock more performance from existing cooling systems.
This is not just a thermal advantage. It also improves site-wide energy management and opens the door to viable heat reuse, which is increasingly being seen as a benchmark of sustainable data centre design in Europe and beyond.
Integration without disruption
What sets successful infrastructure innovation apart is not just technical performance – it’s how seamlessly it can be deployed. For any new technology to gain traction, it must fit into real-world operations without triggering a cascade of risk or cost.
That’s where modern optical switching holds promise. It needs to work with standard networking protocols like Ethernet and operate within familiar spine-and-leaf architectures. This enables a phased rollout, targeting the most performance or heat intensive workloads first, without needing a wholesale rebuild.
This modular adoption approach is essential for data centre operators trying to balance experimentation with uptime guarantees.
What switching tells us about infrastructure leadership
As the industry transitions from raw capacity building to smart optimisation, the value lies not in adding more, but in designing better. A lower-power switch is not just a network improvement – it’s a catalyst for gains across power provisioning, thermal management, and overall infrastructure resilience.
This reflects a new kind of leadership. Infrastructure decision-makers are increasingly expected to anticipate where bottlenecks will emerge next and act before they become critical, but in a way that doesn’t impact future needs. Switching may have flown under the radar in the past, but its effect on performance and sustainability metrics is now too significant to ignore.
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Data centres are no longer just warehouses to hold servers. They are critical national infrastructure, digital factories, and carbon-accountable assets. As such, every element of their design must contribute to a system that is intelligent, efficient, and adaptable.
Smarter switching represents an opportunity to reimagine a core component of that system. Not with hype or wholesale disruption, but with practical, incremental change that makes everything in the stack work better.
