To ensure that fibre in datacentres is reliable, network professionals need a more accurate and faster methodology to assess the integrity of the infrastructure.

Chris Taylor, Regional Sales Director – Asia Pacific – HATA Region, Fluke Networks, says, “Datacentre technology is advancing at a tremendous pace to meet the challenges of reliably delivering critical applications for enterprises. The integrity of the datacentre infrastructure relies upon the strength of the fibre network.

“Not only are datacentres getting bigger and faster, but the architecture is becoming increasingly complex, especially at the physical layer. The high-speed traffic exchange among servers, storage and networking devices consumes an ever-larger amount of fibre.”

Maintaining high availability with the diagnostic tools currently available is an almost impossible job. To address this a new class of Optical Time Domain Reflectometer (OTDR), capable of characterising and certifying enterprise fibre, has emerged.

Chris adds, “Choosing the right device not only solves this new generation of datacentre testing requirements but also helps professionals work efficiently and increase the reliability and value of the enterprise fibre network.”

Key criteria for choosing a datacentre OTDR

1. A simplified and task-focused user interface. Populating a datacentre with thousands of tested fibres is an enormously time-consuming job. Maintaining fibre health is just as challenging and makes fast troubleshooting critical. Almost every OTDR on the market today is designed to cover carrier applications. As a result, many have very complicated user interfaces, which require the user to grapple with numerous buttons and controls and navigate cumbersome multi-level menus, which is not suitable for enterprise network technicians. An OTDR designed around the enterprise workflow, with an intuitive user interface, greatly improves operating efficiency. Simple-to-use test equipment shortens the learning curve, reduces testing time and ultimately saves money.

2. Precision fibre channel information. With the increasing use of short patch fibres and multi-fibre connectors, details on every link including loss, connector and reflectance, are critical to ensuring performance. OTDRs with an attenuation dead zone of more than three metres are no longer applicable for testing datacentre fibre. Ultra-short dead zones are needed to find issues that jeopardise the link-loss budget or cause serious signal degradation. In addition, fast problem resolution requires that faults and events be presented in a simple, graphical map so users at various skill levels can efficiently perform fibre troubleshooting and accelerate network recovery.

3. Effective planning and documentation. As datacentres grow and change, coordinating projects and ensuring that all fibres are installed with certified quality is challenging. There are a number of software applications available for project management, but until recently none have been integrated with an OTDR. Integrated project management capabilities with cable-by-cable granularity can save time and planning effort. Look for an OTDR with built-in project management capability that lets you plan day-to-day activities without using a PC or laptop and use a single tool to control, monitor, consolidate and document all test results.