Port Breakouts and Subminiature Connectors

Data centers can be intensively developed to reduce the required space, reduce costs, and achieve high-speed transmission through the use of modern transceivers.

The current answer is: use the parallel port breakout and very small connector (VSFFC). The so-called port branch refers to the use of high-speed transceiver ports in the Base-8 system based on 8-core optical fibers to achieve parallel optical fiber transmission at a speed of 800G (for example only). But this is not achieved with a single port transport, instead it requires 4 ports of 200G in a spine-leaf architecture, or 400G ports in a leaf-server architecture, which are then split as 8 ports of 50G run. In this way, a high-speed port can be broken down into multiple ports, and the transmission rate of each port will not be too high.

This solution not only meets the bandwidth requirements, but also reduces energy consumption, and the cooling time is less than that required by 800G. But for most data center operators, there is still a long way to go to achieve 800G transmission speed. In addition, this solution is also applicable to the 40G, 100G or 400G transmission speeds of the current mainstream ultra-large-scale/cloud data centers . Taking a 100G duplex transceiver as an example, its power consumption for a QSFP-DD module is about 4.5 watts. In contrast, a 400G parallel optical transceiver operating in split mode with four 100G ports consumes only 3 watts per port. This can save up to 30% in electricity, regardless of the power consumption and space of the air conditioner and the switch chassis.

Achieving sustainable data center management and reducing downtime for network upgrades or expansions go hand in hand.

Port breakouts have another advantage: If future upgrades are required, data center operators can upgrade to higher transmission speeds with only minor changes in the passive network infrastructure , without changing technology or completely replacing cabling components . It can be said that achieving sustainable management of data centers and reducing downtime for network upgrades or expansions are complementary.

With the introduction of 400G and future 800G transceivers, we will also add additional connector interfaces on the basis of traditional LC duplex and MPO-12 wiring interfaces, such as the new MPO-16 and MPO-12 DD (double row ) interface, and subminiature connector SN, CS, and MDC interfaces.

One LC duplex connector can accommodate up to three MDC or SN connector interfaces, triple the density and reduce the total cost of ownership. In addition, MDC and SN connectors also offer the possibility of direct port branching at the transceiver level for point-to-point cabling.