The deployment and termination of fiber optic cabling in data center usually cost a lot of time and labor. However, with the increasingly need for high density cabling in 40G/100G data centers, fiber cabling and termination become even more difficult and time-consuming if traditional field termination methods are still applied. And fiber optic networks are becoming more and more complex, which makes data center cabling becomes more difficult. Risks of faults caused by manual fiber termination will increase. To solve this problem and meet high density requirements of data centers, pre-termianted fiber cabling assemblies are introduced.

Pre-terminated fiber cabling is relatively a much easier way to install fiber optic cable. The connectors you specify are pre-terminated for you, and the fiber cable you specify is cut to the proper length that you need, such as LC to LC fiber patch cable, SC to LC cable, SC to ST fiber cable, or single mode patch cable, multimode patch cord. Deploying a data center by using field termination methods might need a few days or more. Engineers have to terminate a lot of fiber optic links and connect them to the right ports. To make sure there are no wrong links or bad fiber optic splicing joints, a lot of checking should be done.

However, pre-terminated fiber cable assemblies, using the plug-and-play designed modules and cables, can largely improve the working efficiency, increase cabling density and decrease the total data center installation cost. For example, multi-mode fiber networks for 40G/100G applications use parallel transmission with 8 or 20 fibers per link utilizing 12-fiber MTP/MPO connectors, making it harder to terminate than a single fiber connector. Instead, a pre-terminated MPO cable would be much easier. In addition, the factory terminated fiber cable assemblies eliminate the need of fiber optic splicing and provide higher performance compared with field terminated fiber optic cables.

Commonly used pre-terminated fiber cabling assemblies for 40G/100G high density cabling applications are MTP/MPO fiber cable assemblies, including MTP/MPO trunk cable, MTP/MPO harness cable and MTP/MPO cassette. Making good use of these components can largely increase cabling density and working efficiency in data centers.

MTP/MPO trunk cable is a length of multi-fiber optical cable, which is usually used for backbone transmission in data center. 12-fiber MTP/MPO trunk cable and 24-fiber MTP/MPO trunk cable are commonly used for 40G and 100G applications separately. Generally, there are two versions of MTP/MPO trunk cable, single-strand MTP/MPO trunk cable and multi-strand MTP/MPO trunk cable. A multi-strand MTP/MPO trunk cable combines several single-stand MTP/MPO trunk cables together. For example, a 72-fiber MTP/MPO trunk cable has 6 strands of 12-fiber cables combining together and each strand is terminated with a 12-fiber MTP/MPO connector.

MTP/MPO harness cable is a fanout version of MTP/MPO optical cable. An MTP/MPO fiber optic connector is terminated on one end of the cable, and the fanout end is terminated with several other types of fiber optic connectors, which usually are LC fiber optic connectors. MTP/MPO harness cable is generally used for 40G to 10G transmission or 100G to 10G transmission. MTP/MPO harness cable also has various versions. The most commonly used types are 12-fiber MTP/MPO to 6 duplex LC harness cable for 40G duplex transmission and 24-fiber MTP/MPO to 12 duplex LC harness cable for 100G duplex transmission.

MTP/MPO cassette is a specially designed box which contains one or more small version of MTP harness cables inside it. Generally there is one MTP interface on the back rear of an MTP/MPO cassette and several LC interfaces on its front rear. It can be easily installed on the rack for easier cabling as shown in the following picture. In this way, the fiber optic connections are protected in this box and more fiber optic connections can be added to the data center without worrying about space limitation. The most commonly used are MTP/MPO LGX cassettes. However, driven by increasing need for high density, the size of MTP/MPO cassette gradually decreases. HD MTP/MPO cassette is also available in the market for higher cabling density.

Pre-terminated fiber cable assemblies help accelerate data center deployment, reduce costss and errors, and provide great flexibility and scalability. MTP/MPO cabling system as one of the most popular pre-terminated fiber cabling solutions can perfectly fit the 40G and 100G applications. The above mentioned products are just a really small part of the pre-terminated fiber cable assemblies.

Posted by: jowang at 07:01 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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