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Today’s data centers (DC) present a challenge in meeting critical business needs in the face of burgeoning transactions and exploding amounts of information that must be stored and managed. With over five exabytes of new information being generated each year globally, even modest data centers must flexibly meet demands for growth in a high-reliability environment. While expansion can be accommodated by adding new servers and storage, it is also met by increasing bandwidth to allow more transmissions per second. Data rates have progressively moved from 10 Mb/s through 100 Mb/s and 1 Gb/s to today’s 10 Gb/s and tomorrow’s 40 or 100 Gb/s.
As data rates increase, the use of fiber-optic cabling in the DC is becoming more commonplace. Advances in optical technology make fiber more affordable, more practical, and easier to use in the data center. These improvements include:
• 50-micron laser-optimized multimode fiber
(LOMF) that allows cable runs of 300 meters at 10 Gb/s with traditional LOMF. Up to 600 meters is possible with a new generation of enhanced LOMF, exemplified by Berk-Tek GIGAlite ™-XB cable. As will be shown, this second generation of LOMF gives even greater flexibility in meeting the needs of DCs.
• Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) that lower the cost of optical transceivers. Since they are well matched to LOMF at a wavelength of 850 nm, they make the use of multimode fiber economically attractive.
• Cassette-based interconnects that speed the installation of fiber-based cabling systems and simplify the on-going management of the system. The Momentum® series of cassettes from Ortronics/Legrand offer improved performance over legacy cassettes of just a few years ago.
Read the entire white paper for the full discussion.
Fiber in the Data Center
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