With the rapid development of big data, cloud computing, Internet of Things, and mobile Internet, banks, taxation, hospitals, e-commerce, and other industries rely on the support of data centers, and the traffic of data centers is increasing day by day. In the future, data centers must be the data warehouse and heart of social information systems in the future. In order to cope with the huge demand of data transmission, more and more enterprises choose to build multiple data centers. The following is an introduction to the currently used optical modules and multimode fiber.
As an important component of fiber optic communication, optical modules are used to transmit and receive optical signals. ETU-LINK has found through market research that the most popular ones are 25G, 40G and 100G optical modules, which are mainly used in data center core switches. 40G ports on the switches constitute 40G Ethernet by matching QSFP+ optical modules. From the ports on the aggregation layer switches to the core layer heart routing switches now use 100G ports. 100G QSFP28 optical modules with low power consumption, small size and low fiber usage win the market’s favor and are commonly used in the matching scheme of 100G Ethernet switch optical modules.
Although multimode fiber is more expensive than single-mode fiber and the transmission bandwidth is not as high as single-mode, the low price of multimode fiber transceivers makes the indoor multimode fiber communication system cheaper than single-mode fiber communication system in terms of comprehensive cost. Multimode fiber was first OM1, OM2, after the use of VCSEL laser optimization after the emergence of OM3, OM4. because the distance between equipment in large and medium-sized data centers is generally within 500M, so usually with multimode OM3, OM4 fiber.
Until recent years, multimode fiber upgraded to OM5, OM5 has four channels, which laterally extends the wavelength range supported by OM3 and OM4 fiber, in addition to increasing the bandwidth requirements at 953 nm wavelength, making OM5 transmission capacity increased four times. The use of OM5 fiber is compatible with both the original traditional parallel optical modules and optical modules that support duplex transmission. Therefore, from the perspective of overall data center investment cost, return on investment and risk control, OM5 fiber will be the preferred transmission medium for new data center optical interconnects in the future.
