TE Connectivity (TE) has announced that it has provided new options for data centre designers looking to improve design flexibility in high-speed data center environments. TE achieved this breakthrough by proving the performance of a 10-connector channel in a data centre design used by a major European national government.

Data centre designers face increasing restrictions on the flexibility of their infrastructure design because of the increasing speed and volume of data being transmitted across links in modern data centres. These increasing transmission speeds limit the number of connectors that can be included within a channel because of the inherent losses each connection point introduces into the transmission path. This, in turn, reduces infrastructure design options, which can compromise the agility of the data centre in meeting user demands.

To improve agility, TE placed a cross-connect in the main distribution area, the horizontal distribution area and the equipment distribution area of the data centre to form part of the design. This meant that a high-performance optical cabling and connectivity solution was required to support the resulting 10-connector channel as each extra interconnect would add extra loss which could quickly use up the losses allowed in the application loss budget.

To show how this agile design could be delivered, TE demonstrated a 100m, 10-connector channel composed of multiple sections of OM4 fibre optic cable interconnected with TE’s MPOptimate high-performance, low-loss MPO system. Both 10Gbps Ethernet and 8Gbps fibre channel transmissions were successfully delivered over the same 100m link, with outstanding transmission characteristics as shown on the industry-standard eye-pattern diagram graphic. The eye pattern gives a visual representation of how clearly the data is ‘seen’ by the receiving equipment in the data centre. The measured optical signal integrity through the 100m 10-connector channel was nearly identical to that of the original transceiver signal.

“The secret to the success of the MPOptimate connector is based on the tight control of the fibre end face geometries and the high-precision polishing techniques used in the manufacturing process,” says Willy Rietveld, head of the enterprise networks fiber optic group based at TE’s world class fibre laboratories in Den Bosch, Netherlands.

”This high level of connector performance gives data centre owners more flexibility in designing an infrastructure to support an agile data centre.”