DATA CENTRES
Navigating the fibre landscape
Fibre has become ubiquitous in the world of data centres . It is also steadily evolving . Here Alberto Zucchinali of Siemon reviews the latest fibre applications , standards and technologies for optimum support of IoT and Big Data in the data centre environment .
The Internet of Things ( IoT ) is rapidly evolving and brings many great advantages to organisations . However , the vast amount of Big Data that is expected from IoT , as well as from increasing storage intensive and cloud based applications , has a significant impact on data centres .
Within the data centre environment , especially within switch-to-switch backbone links to the core and to the storage area network ( SAN ), there is immense pressure to handle extreme data volumes . To process this data , switch-to-switch links are rapidly migrating from 10 Gigabit per second ( Gb / s ) speeds to 40 and 100 Gb / s and beyond , which is best served by optical fibre cabling . In addition to higher speeds , the sheer number of equipment and fibre links continue to increase , leading to increased densities of fibre connections that need to be carefully managed .
With several fibre applications , standards and technologies available , data centre managers need to understand current and future choices that provide reliable , low latency , high bandwidth connections , as well as maximum management and scalability .
More choices , more confusion
As data centres strive to handle increasing data volumes and migrate to higher speeds , the various applications and fibre types available can cause some confusion . First and foremost , data centres looking to upgrade their entire backbone data centre cabling are faced with whether to deploy multimode or singlemode cable . While singlemode may offer the best future proof capabilities ,
Siemon ’ s Alberto Zucchinali
‘ With several fibre applications , standards and technologies available , data centre managers need to understand current and future choices …‘
28 | March 2017