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The last few years have seen the demands placed on data centres increase exponentially as the amount of traffic they have to deal with grows.
Just a few years ago, rates of 1Gbps seemed fast, yet now 10Gbps is the standard and speeds of up to 40Gbps are not far away.
Mission Critical magazine noted that this is being driven by a huge range of data-intensive business and consumer services. These include greater internet use, social media data, Internet of Things devices and software-defined infrastructure, which all generate huge amounts of data. In fact, it is estimated that by 2020, up to 35 trillion terabytes of data will be created every year.
Therefore, data centre administrators need to think carefully about their strategies for upgrading their solutions in order to cope with this. And one technology that can be expected to play a key role in this is wideband multimode fibre (WBMMF).
Until now, administrators looking to migrate their data centre to a higher rate essentially had three options to choose from - duplex single-mode fibre running at higher serial data rates, wave division multiplexing over duplex single-mode fibre, or parallel multimode fibre.
However, each of these has its own pros and cons, with IT pros having to find a balance between transceiver costs and fibre costs. But there is now a fourth emerging option: short wavelength division multiplexing (SWDM) over duplex multimode fibre. And the key element of this is the fibre itself.
WBMMF - also known as OM5 by the International Standards Organisation and International Electrotechnical Commission - works over a broader spectrum than previous technologies. It achieves this by using four different wavelengths for the transmission of data - enabling a single cable to carry four times the amount of data without any decrease in transmission rates.
Crucially, it is able to attain this level of performance while still supporting legacy applications that operate on OM4 technology.
"WBMMF enables new generations of 40G, 100G, 200G, 400G Ethernet, and the up-and-coming fibre channel speeds - 128G and 256G fibre channel," Mission Critical stated. "Effectively it increases the utility of multimode fibre as a universal communications medium in the data centre."
Mission Critical noted that the data centre industry is rapidly moving towards shortwave multiplexing technology with a new generation of transceivers and multi-rate switches.
The publication stated that by optimising performance with wideband multimode fibre, while still retaining support for legacy applications at OM4 capability, this presents opportunities to introduce these technologies alongside existing Ethernet and fibre channels. "This combination of technologies will continue the legacy of delivering lowest-cost optical solutions over the universal medium that is multimode fibre," it added.
