COPPER CABLING
Ultra high-speed copper in the data centre Has Fibre Finally Won? We spoke to Ken Hodge, CTO, Brand-Rex
Introduction If you’ve read the trade press lately, you’ll have probably formed the opinion that apart from some very short- reach copper cables, fibre is the only solution for 40Gb/s and 100Gb/s data connectivity. And at this point in 2012 you’d be right. But perhaps not for long. We caught up with Brand-Rex CTO
Brand-Rex CTO Ken Hodge believes in the future of ultra high-speed copper in the data centre.
Ken Hodge, who claims that data centres need 40/100G copper ASAP – and that many enterprise backbones would benefit from this technology in the coming few years. He believes copper may once again oust fibre for under 100m channels.
David Mackenzie: Why do we need 40G and 100G?
Ken Hodge: The world we live and work in is, as we know, becoming more and more online. In our private lives it’s facebook or twitter, online gaming and video on demand streaming services like Netflix or Amazon’s Lovefilm sending multiple GigaBytes per film over our home broadband to our PC, X-Box or even to our smartphones. The mobile phone has morphed from a simple analogue voice device to a mobile computer, video, calling device,
online TV receiver that almost every man, woman and child carries with them 24x7. The volume of data that these devices threaten to produce and consume is astronomic. In business, we’re increasingly using hosted services like Google Docs or
SalesManager.com, webcasts, LinkedIn, facebook, twitter and enterprise-scale hosted apps such as Enterprise Resource Planning. If you need any further convincing that the growth of data communications is more like an avalanche than gentle snowfall, there’s the inevitability of massive amounts of machine-to- machine data communication in coming years. In the data centre specifically, the move to virtualisation, with dozens of virtual servers running on each piece of server hardware means that each physical box’s Ethernet I/0 is now handling the aggregate traffic of all of those virtual servers which in the old days would each have had their own 1Gb/s Ethernet links. In the backbone too, users are already aggregating multiple 10Gb/s links to achieve higher effective speeds because 10Gb/s already isn’t enough. It’s not a question of whether we need 40G and 100G, it’s a question of where do we go after those?
DM: How realistic is 40/100G over copper?
KH: As far back as August 2009, Penn State University in the USA undertook modelling studies that showed fairly convincingly that up to 50Gb/s over 100m should be possible. At 100Gb/s, the study predicted a maximum of 70m. Our own predictive studies at Brand- Rex came to similar conclusions with the caveat that the greater the distance required, the greater the complexity and cost. So, it’s important to understand that the final solution will be based not just on physics, but on economics with a fair injection of industry politics.
DM: How important is it to have 100m links?
KH: Historically, all of the ‘categories’ of cabling for Ethernet have been based on a 100 metre channel. That is because they were originally designed for the Enterprise horizontal network connecting out to desks and workstations. But it’s debateable whether there is sense in sticking to this dogma for 40Gb/s, 100Gb/s and faster since, realistically, they are unlikely to be used in the enterprise horizontal in the next 10 to 15 years. Why does this matter? Well the longer the link length – the more complex and expensive it is to design the cabling system and its electronics. In the data centre today with our own Cat6A 10Gb/s zone cable, which we miniaturised by reducing its reach to 70m, we know that this covers approximately 97 percent of all possible data centre links. And in fact, if you know you have a 70m limit when you design the D.C., you can easily design it so that all links are less than 70m.
Link Length Can the RJ45 re-invent itself again? 24 NETCOMMS europe Volume III Issue 1 2012
<10m <30m <50m <70m
Percentage of all data centre links covered
33% 80% 93% 97%
www.netcommseurope.com
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