SCIENCE

The recently ratified IEEE 802.3ba Standard specifies 40 Gb/s and 100 Gb/s Ethernet applications for deployment over optical fiber cabling and high speed interconnect assemblies. Siemon supports the newly ratified 802.3ba Standard with a comprehensive product offering consisting of:

• 40 Gb/s and 100 Gb/s support of up to 100 meters over Siemon's XGLO OM3 multimode optical fiber and MTP connectivity in short reach mode.
• 40 Gb/s and 100 Gb/s support of up to 150 meters over Siemon's XGLO OM4 multimode optical fiber and MTP connectivity in short reach mode.
• 40 Gb/s and 100 Gb/s support of up to 10 kilometers over Siemon's XGLO singlemode optical fiber and LC connectivity in long reach mode.
• 100 Gb/s support of up to 40 kilometers over Siemon's XGLO singlemode optical fiber and LC connectivity in extended reach mode.
• 40 Gb/s support of up to 5 meters over Siemon's QSFP+ passive copper high speed interconnect assemblies.
• 40 Gb/s support of up to 4 kilometers over Siemon's Moray QSFP+ active optical cable assemblies.

"Siemon has always been on the cutting edge with our twisted-pair and optical fiber cabling solutions and our new high speed interconnect technology enables us to support Ethernet deployment across the entire breadth of possible datacenter configurations," explains John Siemon, chief technology officer of The Siemon Company. "The decision to develop high speed interconnect solutions was based on global market drivers and technical studies that clearly demonstrate increased adoption of direct connections between servers and switches located in the same rack or in adjacent racks. By extending our family of cabling products, we are able to support both traditional structured cabling as well as factory pre-configured unified architecture deployments to meet our customer's datacenter needs."

While the current 40 Gb/s and 100 Gb/s copper deployments are limited to short length twinaxial cable assemblies, this emerging technology is anticipated to drive advancements related to the support of next generation Ethernet applications over twisted-pair cabling.

"Unfortunately, some manufacturers are taking advantage of the lack of information regarding the IEEE 802.3ba standard by making claims regarding support of 40 Gb/s applications with twisted-pair cabling," says Robert Carlson, Siemon's vice president of global marketing. "In the absence of a call-for-interest by IEEE, application support claims cannot be verified. Any such claims are misleading."

Until objectives for a new Ethernet project are adopted, assessing headroom to published standards and selecting products with stable transmission performance at extended bandwidths is the only way to differentiate performance capability between manufacturers.

Based on its industry leading performance and bandwidth capability, Carlson notes that Siemon's TERA category 7A cabling system is ideally prepared to support applications beyond 10GBASE-T. TERA systems provide performance up to at least 1.2 GHz, deliver guaranteed transmission headroom for improved signal-to-noise margin and have been deployed globally for more than a decade.