It’s that time of year again. All your network projects are completed, or nearing completion. And you’ve managed to do so well under budget… perhaps too far under. If you’re concerned about losing your end-of-year surplus from your budget next year, here are some useful optical products that it might make sense to stock up on for 2020 and beyond.
Fiber Patch Cables
Perhaps the most flexible purchase you can make, fiber patch cables can be stored for use in any number of projects over the next year or more. In fact, it can be useful to keep a number of distances of the fiber types (e.g., single mode fiber, OM3 multimode) and connectors (e.g., LC/UPC, SC/APC) that are common throughout your network in case of emergency breakages or future planned deployments.
DACs, AOCs, and BOCs
These cables offer an affordable alternative to optical transceivers connected by a fiber patch cable, and are ideal for simplifying inter- and intra-rack connections in a data center environment. This family of cables includes:
- Direct attach cables (DACs): two transceivers of the same data rate connected by a length of copper wire. These can be passive or active, depending on the data rate and distance requirements.
- Active optical cables (AOCs): two transceivers connected by a length of fiber optic cable, containing entirely active components.
- Breakout cables (BOCs): one higher data rate transceiver connected to four lower date rate transceivers, e.g., 40G to 4x10G. This configuration is particularly useful for connecting top-of-rack (ToR) switches with multiple distribution switches.
These cables can be programmed for one-to-one compatibility with one, or in some cases, multiple platform brands.
Optical Transceivers
While easy to overlook in larger budgetary planning discussions, these humble pieces remain essential to reliable network connectivity. If you aren’t planning a comprehensive network upgrade next year, it can make a lot of sense to invest your budget surplus in building up a sparing inventory of the transceivers you use most in your network. This may mean anything from a 10km 1G SFP or 40km 10G SFP+.
Standard Passive Filters
When most people think about CWDM or DWDM mux/demuxes, they think about large-scale projects that require extensive architectural and budgetary planning. However, this doesn’t always need to be the case: our standard 8 channel passives can be useful to keep on-hand if you experience an unexpected spike in bandwidth in part of your network. Their initial cost is relatively low, and their simple design provides reliable service for many years with virtually zero maintenance requirements.
If you would like to discuss these solutions ow how to use end-of-year surplus, contact Champion ONE today.
