The war between copper and fiber has been raged for years and it is never ended. Copper-based systems maintain the same upgrade path that they have for years, while fiber-optic proponents continue to advocate their sense of superiority, wh…

Fiber optic links are vital for providing the bandwidth and speed needed to transmit huge amounts of data to and from a large number of sources. Recently more bandwidth is greatly needed to support the use of virtualization and improved sp…

There is no doubt that 40 and 100 GbE are just around the corner, or the reality is coming. To keep up with the pace, data center managers are striving to determine which fiber optic links will support 10 GbE today while future proofing th…

Small form-factor pluggable (SFP) is a prevailing type of optical transceivers in the market widely utilized for Gigabit Ethernet application. As it has the same function with GBIC but with a smaller size, SFP transceiver is also called mi…

The past decades witnessed the tremendous advancement in Ethernet network transmission speeds from 10/100 base systems to 1G then 10G deployments. Today, 10G server uplinks are ubiquitous in the data center, driven by the need for higher b…

Gigabit Ethernet has been regarded as a huge breakthrough of telecom industry by offering speeds of up to 100Mbps. Gigabit Ethernet is a standard for transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second. There are five physical l…

With the requirements laid on data center increasing rapidly, the ability to flexibly adapt to future demands is tremendously crucial for data center managers. Often this can be achieved by deploying higher bandwidth solutions in a part of…

Defined in 2002, XFP (10 Gigabit Small Form Factor Pluggable) is a hot-swappable and protocol-independent transceiver for 10G high-speed computer network and telecommunication links. Except for XFP, there are SFP and SFP+ transceivers avai…

Ratified in 2006, 10GBASE-T is the standard to provide 10Gbqs connections over balanced twisted-pair copper, including Category 6A unshielded and shielded cabling. It provides great flexibility in network design due to its 100-meter reach …

How do I determine the type of fiber needed for my campus backbone? This is the question routinely asked by network designers. I must say, with many cabling options available in the market, it is a huge project to deploy a Gigabit Ethernet…