High-Density Fiber Connectivity for Data Centers (MPO/MTP)

hello my name is Dan Voris I'm the product manager for cable and connectivity products here at black box you're about to view a previously recorded webinar on the evolution of MPO style multi-fiber array connectivity this webinar explores the components applications and potential future of MPO stay with us at the end of the webinar for more information about black box's MPO style solutions today we're going to talk a little bit about MTP and MPO connectors you know what is MTP and MPO we'll talk about the components that are involved in the solution you get into some examples for specifically these examples are going to be around twelve strand applications and later on as we begin to explore MTP and MPI we'll talk a little bit more about 24 strand and some of the other configurations but for for the purposes of this meeting we're going to stick to twelve strand applications initially and the reason we're going to do all this is I want to give everybody a sense of the basics you know what makes this solution up and what's important about it so that as we begin to talk about the last things which is really what I want to you know kind of focus on today is where does the solution fit today and where is it going in the future right how do we support today 10 gig applications and what does that look like as we move forward into the future we're 40 gig applications are going to become more commonplace and we're going to start to see you know more requests for hundred gigabit per second configurations and that's where the future of 24 strand MPO comes into question so with that let's jump in and start to talk about you know what is MTP or MP oh so MP o stands for multi fiber push on pull off it's a standard it's not a it's not a piece of hardware so MP o as a connector is a standard it meets the IEC specification here if you're not familiar so IEC is for the International Electrotechnical Commission and you know as we go through these things we hear but a lot about that right there's a lot of different organizations out there later on in the presentation we're going to talk about IEE that's the Institute for electrical Electronics Engineers so that's the hardware side of the business right so the OEE specifications around 40 gig and 100 gig that we talk about later on are kind of on the the electronic side which certainly informs you know some of the pieces and parts that were going to talk about today on the cabling side where you'll get will get more discussions about TIAA and ISO so MPO is a standard it talks about how you make this connector what it does how its put together MTP stands for multi fiber termination push on so MTP is a specific brand of an MPO style connector MTP was developed by us connect long ago it was it's basically a joint venture between Corning Fuji Kura and NTT 80 these guys got together and said hey we see this an MPO standard which they helped develop by the way and we think that we can make some improvements on that but the most important thing to remember is whether you're talking about MTP which is heavily marketed in the US or if you're more familiar with hearing them called MPO which we hear a lot more about in europe and asia they are 100% interchangeable these two things work together right they're all any time I talk about MTP it's just a version of an MPO style connector it just has some subtle differences to it that we think make the connector a little bit better so before I move on a little bit let's talk a little bit about what what this stuff is why do you use it why do I need MTP MPO so I like to think about it as kind of a fiber version of copper feed through panels right we're all familiar with copper feed through it's a quick way to you know take my copper bulk and run it into the back of a patch panel and do what I call plug and play right there's no field termination I've already got an RJ on either side and I just plug my terminated ball core my patch cords into either side clip in clip in and I'm finished this is the same concept with fiber the only differences we're talking about multiple fibers so instead of a single run you know or four pairs of copper or a fully duplex set of fiber optic cables I do one connection and I get twelve fiber connections or six fully duplex pairs in this case for twelve strand applications and and twice that many for for 24 strand so you know this is about rapid deployment it's primarily seen in the data center you don't see this outside the data center talking about getting data or runs from rack to rack right so it's about having a more controlled environment for termination right so these are manufactured in a controlled environment where they're done one after another and they're tested so I can expect to see a better quality connection that I would in the field I can see less loss and a more consistent budgeting number so when it comes time to do my fiber loss budgeting these are a little bit more consistent and lastly I think probably the most important reason to even consider this stuff is the time savings you know again think back to the connections I can clip in you know one of these MPO style connectors in seconds and get 12 or 24 or more connections for some of the more exotic types of these these connectors and you can just imagine 2 to 3 minutes or longer a piece for each if I had to do this using a you know independent fusion splicing buzz fusing on individual Elsie's so it's a lot of advantages in terms of plug-and-play you know when it comes to this stuff let's just talk a little bit about those differences I mentioned early on that MTP was just a variant on the MPO style connector so in this slide we can see some of the differences there's a lot more but these are the ones that I think are most relevant and you know if you're going to talk to somebody else about them this is what this is what you talk about I think the biggest change is the the shape of the guide pins a little later on the presentation I'm going to show you a kind of a close-up of the end face of what these MTP connectors look like but they all have to guide pins on either side because you have to imagine that you're trying to align fibers end to end and that alignment has to be very precise for the size of these things so if it's out of alignment even a little bit then you're not going to get good connectivity in this case the MPOs standard calls for a kind of a squared off edges you can see in that bottom illustration and the MTP ones are rounded what does this mean for us it means cleaner mating so I have some other slides if anybody's interested in seeing them a little more detail that shows some testing and you know the kind of damage to the the female side of the of the connector or the adapter after so many mates using an MPO style so it starts to deform the hole and it gets a little bit oblong of course then there's the opportunity for for material to get on the face of the MPO connector and potentially cause loss or you know dark fiber we don't see that as much in the elliptical guide pins because it just allows that MTP rounded shape to kind of slide in there a little bit easier another advantage is the MTP connector uses an oval spring for the connector it provides a little bit more clearance and aids in the mechanical performance reducing damage potential damage to those fibers so you can see from the illustration in this case from showing a 24 strand MTP connector with two rows those those kind of orange colored ones in the middle because you see the MTP connector there's a little bit more space on the outside edges so that compression spring isn't coming anywhere near my fibers and last my last example down here talks about the spring itself in the MTP version it's seated into a medical clinic metal clamp and it kind of seats that spring make sure it's lined just right and kind of holds it in place where the MTP spec only calls for a plastic block that it sits on so those are three examples the MTP stuff do a few other things there's a it has a floating fail that maintained a little bit more accuracy it has a removable housing and that gets into later on we will maim ention that you know all this stuff comes in in male and female versions right those that have the guide pins and those that do not and every connection one or the other means to have the guide pins those are removable in an MTP so that there's a kit that you can get that you can take the guide pins out or add them if you need to change genders so I've mentioned several times that there are both 12 and 24 strand mpos and those are the ones I'm going to focus on today and here's an example of each so again you know as I mentioned before this MPO interface meets the specific standards and while MPO and MTP type connectors are interchangeable when it comes to strand count they are not right so I can't take an m12 strand connector and made it to a 24 strand connector they twelve strand as you can see down below in the illustration the two larger round dots at the end represent my guide pins or or the guide pin holes in a female version and there's a single row of 12 fibers if you ever grab a trunk cable and hold it up to the light when it gets just right you can see that that very small row of fibers poking through there on the 24 strand version there's two rows and neither of them line up with the row and twelve strand so they don't they don't mix and match so you sort of have to kind of pick your poison as it were I'm going to come to your configuration in your solutions in terms of what you're trying to accomplish and we're going to talk about that later on the virtues of why I would choose 12 strand or 24 strand for my specific application another thing to mention before I move out this slide is and I'm not going to get into it too deep in this conversation but we could have another entire bit to talk about how these things are keyed when I say key you think about a again a reference copper if you think about copper and rj45 only goes into the jack one way right it's got a little key on top or on the bottom depending and you clip it in these MPO style connectors are the same way and so it's important when you're thinking about these solutions to understand whether you're your connector is keyed up or keep down I'm going to talk a little bit about that later but it has a lot to do with polarity so imagine this you're seeing that this is not a single connection right there's 12 or 24 let's talk about 12 for a second if I were to insert this into something keyed in one direction I may be looking at fibers 1 through 12 if I have a keyed the other direction I'm literally flipping or rolling that cable over and now I will be looking at them from a 12 to one perspective now as we talk about this going forward it's going to be one of the key highlights that I'm going to try to come back to over and over again the challenge for using MTP and MPO beyond understanding the need for it in your data center isn't so much how do I put the things together but rather maintaining polarity as you move through so that you know that the first two pairs first two fibers that you're intending to be a connection make it to the end where you expect them to so as I'm making connections and my cables and or my cassettes that we're going to talk about in a minute start to roll those that row of fibers over and over again you have to keep track of that and so there are some standards standard methods around that to help you do that but it's important to remember that these things are keyed and you need to pay attention to that as you're building your solution so let's talk about the components that make up a solution there are lots of them but they break down into three basically simple pieces one of them is the cassette itself so you'll see this in this case I'm showing a 12 strand MTP cassette and I didn't show the internals of this but you know essentially inside this cassette if you were to open it up is nothing more than a harness cable so in the back is an MTP adapter we're going to talk about that in a minute you can see that on the bottom illustration on the left hand side that little nugget sticks out that's the MTP connection and on the right hand side of this illustration are 12 LC s if you were to insert this cassette into an enclosure you couldn't tell any difference between an MTP cassette in the background or that this is just a standard fiber adapter panel it looks exactly the same you know from the front and then on the right-hand side you can sort of see you know an example of what that might look like internally from the 12 LCS and the MPO style connector on the back I mentioned adapters because when you're reading about this stuff everyone you tends to refer to the cassette based on the adapter itself because again inside the cassette it's all the same as I mentioned it's just it's just an internal harness and it's it's connecting the LCS back to the MTP connector the way that the adapter entered the MTP connector in the back is inserted in the cassette determines what type of cassette it is and that's why you're going to see a lot of this stuff as we go through if I slide back you can see my cassette says Type A that tells me something as I'm beginning to build my different solutions I need to know what type every component in my solution is that'll tell me how all those rows are rolling or flipping or not and that will help me maintain my polarity so you can see they all work together like about polarity so I have to care about what type of components I use an egg a set or a B cassette that is simply the difference between my adapter being inserted heat up or keyed down you can see one it has the fibers going 1 through 12 one flips them over so it they run 12 to 1 coming out the back of the cassette the next piece of the of the solution is the trunk cables themselves so these are the cables that would connect cassette to cassette or that would attach into those adapters on the back of the cassette again cables also come in different types depending upon what you're trying to achieve in the solution so here I start to start to define this thing so a standard type a cable is what we might term straight through or in this case key up to key down which means naturally I'm rolling that cable inside the cable and there's reasons to do that versus a B type cable which is key up to key up so I'm not creating that natural role in the cable because I want to eventually have the the Strand number one come out on the on the number 12 side and lastly is type C we call pairwise flipping so it still shows a key up to keep down configuration but I'm flipping the pair's and that's very natural right because we all know that all patch cords regular fiber-optic pass cords have a natural flip in them right because there's two Elsie's on one side and two on the other and for every fiber connection we need a transmit and receive right TX and rx so we want transmit on one end to go to receive on the other so fiber optic patch cables always have that natural pairwise flip we do the same thing through MTP so as I'm creating for instance six connections on a 12 strand MTP cassette because I've got 12 lanes if you will fiber lanes two of each make for a fully duplex pair TX and rx so I get six connections we want to allow the MTP solutions to also do those natural pair flipping so again to keep I can manage my polarity as I move through the solution I want to show you a little bit more about that so here's an example so type a in the previous one you can see the the key here in the table that shows you how they match up so type a is we call them straight through because it's 1 2 1 2 2 2 3 2 3 and so on B which is not used as often flips the entire row so that's why we call them a flipped table so one goes to 12 and 12 to 1 2 to 11 11 to 2 and so on and then lastly again the pairwise flipping just what you expect so 1 to 2 2 to 1 11 to 12 12 to 11 allows each of the different each of the separate six pairs to flip through the trunk cable so that I can kind of keep track again of my polarity as I move through the solution so now that we've looked at the components again as I said there's lots of components of the stuff but it breaks down into a couple simple pieces right so we have our our cassettes themselves and the adapter which kind of makes the cassette we have the trunk cables that connect cassette to cassette and then on the outsides of those from patch cables now this is a very simple you know two point solution and there are many many more now we could get into talking about three point solutions and so on but for the purposes of this I want to show you how these things are used in conjunction to create solutions that that match what you would expect so the some of those bodies that I mentioned up front you know the OEE folks and the folks at ISO and IEC you've kind of come together and put some very specific solutions together to to tell the story about how MTP is used and in in that case they define these very specific methods so you'll see in my table down below I've got connectivity method and then we have types so we already talked about component types right there was a type cassettes and B type cassettes there is a B and C tie trunks those go together with patch cables to create certain methods so this is an example of method a so in this case method a is made up of a trunk cable so this is the first thing this array connector or the cable type in the middle is an a-type cable you can see here it's also the next piece over the adapter is the cassette we already talked about that right that the cassette is really defined by the adapter whether it's keyed up querque down so here I'm using an type-a cassette and by doing that I can look at my diagram at the top I've got a switch on one side a switch on the other and I want to connect them together so first I use my standard patch cord which we talked about has a natural pairwise flipping it so tx2 rx I go through my a type cassette my a trunk which is straight my straight cassette again and now I need a different type of patch cable right the thing we have to remember is through all this in order to maintain polarity we have to have an odd number of flips right the very first one we talked about tx/rx so I'm flipping my pair Y slip one time that's an odd number that works so in this case I have a flip during my patch cable straight straight straight through my cassettes and trunk and so now I need a reverse polarity patch cable on the other side so that I don't end up with an even number of flips and I and I end up TX 2 TX right talking can't go to talking talking has to go to listening so that's connectivity method a I like to switch to see I jump over to see because these are two most common that we see today so see looks like this I want to keep I don't want to keep around a lot of reverse polarity patch cords I just want to have patch cables and be able to swap them in amount without thinking about my solution so in this case we have the the standard patch cables both on the left and right hand side so I'm getting a flip there and flipped there but now I've got an even number of flips so I need to flip my polarity one more time and we do that through this SI trunk cable remember the SI trunk cable allows me to have that pairwise flipping so there you we do the pairwise flipping once for the patch cable straight through for the cassette we flip it again in the trunk straight through the cassette and flip it a third time so 3 is an odd number I've matched my polarity this is this is the kind of thought process that goes through building this stuff whether you build this out to be a lot more complex it's the same process which is why I want to show it today and then lastly I'll show you the bead connectivity and you can see there's quite a bit of a difference here so again my goal here is to keep track of polarity flips I'm using standard patch cables and flipping twice so I need at least one more flip in there the bead Trump cable will do that as well so you could call this a three flipped configuration but I wanted to go from 1 to 2 to 11 to 12 because I wanted the entire row to flip or you can think about this as a is actually 5 flips because the cassettes themselves in this case are also rolling those rows so this is either 3 or 5 both of which are odd numbers so this solution works and I can map you know appropriately my light from one end of the solution to the other and again you know this is kind of where I was leading to early on there are lots of ways to do this you can then start to think about how you might add on to this maybe I need four sets of cassettes to get from A to B in which case you're just adding on more you just have to watch the number of flips or crosses that you're doing so you might have a three point or four point by adding a fiber adapter panel into the mix or harness cables remember harness cables aren't any different than the internal workings of the cassette so once you start to get the basics of the components which is why I want to show these three very basic setups you can start to think about how you could expand this offering and do as many connections as you wanted provided you're within the distance to not kind of blow your lost budget every one of the components that we sell have been tested and have lost budgets already pre-planned so you can kind of go through your scenario knowing how much you expect from your patch cable that Cosette that you have in your hand the trunk cable that you buy and so on and it helps you to easily figure out what your budget is from point to point so that was sort of a long way to go have an intro to get to to this last slide and I probably could have broken the slide up into a lot more but there's a lot to talk about here so I think a simple little illustration is better and I wanted to kind of keep it all in one grid so you could sort of compare them from from point to point so this grid basically shows how twelve and twenty four strand MTP configurations can be used for different speeds today we're primarily focused on just that top row so we've got our ten gigabit connections and when I go to do a 12 fiber MPO which is the standard we've seen the standard written in the presentation today each one of those twelve circles on this illustration represents one lane of fiber and so here's what we've been talking about all along so it's 12 strand one tx/rx makes a fully duplex pair there are six pairs of a fiber at ten gig and we can use that every single day today and works great so so the next question is what what do we need 24 strand for you know why do I even offer that well we do offer it today even though there's no specification written around 24 v or MPO yet so while there is a very clear specification about how 12 fiber is used and how its configured we just saw three examples that are in the ti a a TI ace back about exactly what those methods are and how they go together there is no such thing for for 12 strand a 24 strand I'm sorry for a couple reasons one you've got to ask yourself what the value is and having 24 fibers when the 12 trans stuff is simple and easy to use six pairs you can do create that as many times as you want we have enclosures that hold three six twelve cassettes at a time and you can imagine how many that is when you start you know loading up an entire rack of the stuff but there are a couple applications for twelve five or MPO one is I just simply want to increase my density this I'm going to have a simple point-to-point solution I'm not planning to add a whole bunch of additional parts in so I'm not looking at three point four point using harnesses or adapter panels I just want to get data from one rack to the other and this does a nice job of that I get twice the number of connections in the same footprint and the same size lgx cassette where 12:24 screen gets a challenging though is remember what all along we've been talking about polarity and how important it is to choose your type of component based on what you're looking for in terms of one to one one to twelve or one to two when you get into the twenty fourth strand world imagine what happens if you devotee up two key down there now I'm not just flipping a row I'm I'm swapping the bottom row for the top row as well as going in to end polarity becomes an issue and tracing that polarity through a solution becomes an issue so there's so many ways to to deal with that as you start to rotate through a solution and the number of connections that you know the industry it has yet to kind of agree on the standard and how that you know how you'd actually do that mapping but we do think there's an application for it as I said point-to-point works great there's not a lot of flipping and road changing spots so it's a good application if you're just looking for more density so let's talk a little bit about what comes next so we know that we hear more and more all the time about 40 gig speeds we starting to see more that now you know 40-gig is right on the fringe today there are some electronics out there for it there are some applications out there for but we don't see much of it we think really is afforded gigas and come into its own probably over the next three years 2015 through 2017 we're going to see a lot more applications for 40-gig performance a lot more electronics they become a little more affordable and it makes sense to start to think about how do i implement a 40-gig solution in my data center I would expect beyond 2018 to start to see 40-gig being a regular occurrence and you know the 10 gig stuff starting to kind of really phase out at that point so how do we accomplish 40 gig well we know that each one of the lanes in the example above can it go at 10 gigabits per second so in order to manage a 40 gig connection this is where the MTP MPO style connectors really come into their own so instead of having these you know all of these wires out there and trying to bring them into some consolidation point the MPO cassette is already set up for that so I take my 12 fiber so I mean I'm in the diagram again I'm on the 40 gig row under 12 fibre so I use 4 strands 40 X 4 in the center so 5 6 7 & 8 are dark fiber I don't use them for anything and then my last 4 for our X so by combining 10 10 10 and 10 I get 40 gig and that that is predominantly the application for it so there's already a specification out there ie the electronics guys has a specification in 802 2.3 the talks about using MTP and 40 gig and they're actually working on a new specification right now to extend the distance of 40 gigabits per second so it can go further distances in both multimode and single mode and to further define a little bit more about how this is going to work in the hundred gig world and that's what we're kind of interested in now we're paying a lot of attention to what that hundred gigabit per second vacation looks like but I get that too tenant into a minute so the next question is on my grid is there any value for twenty four or five or mpos in a 40-gig world and again there is there's no specification for it but now you can look at this diagram and see yourself aha so this makes a lot of sense again I can use for fibres 40 X and four for our X but if I group them a little differently now I had can take advantage of those for dark fibers in the middle because I've got two rows and get a whole other set of connections so the big advantage here while not again well not specified by the bodies yet is that if you've got 40 geek electronics you can get three 40 gig connections TX and rx both using a twenty four or five or MPO because I'm using eight for each connection and 3/8 or 24 so there is an application for that as we move through the 40 gig another reason why we carry a 24 v rmp oh we're kind of getting set up for you know what does the 40 gig world look like so let's talk about a hundred gig this is again this is we move this this certainly further out we see almost no application for 100 gig until at least you know four or five years from now and then even at that point it's going to be on the fringe and we I don't think it's really going to pick up until you know 2019 2020 timeframe so we've got five or six years before we see this stuff coming on the challenge is how will we use it so let's look at our example in a 12 fiber MPO world I can't do 100 Gig right so I have to think about how I did how did I come for 40 gig I used for 10 gig lanes 40 X and 4 for Rx and I was able to combine them together get to get 40 gig in a 100 degree I need 10 lanes 10 gigabits per second times 10 gives me 100 100 gigs but I've only got 12 fibers so twelve strand MTP because that doesn't do me any good there are applications I put not applicable or use to twelve strands so I've seen that in applications where someone would say well just use two cassettes great right we can create trunks for that and they'll be used in the same way that you see next door so under the twenty or four or five or MPO we can see I've got 24 fibers now so this configuration is my number one and twelve go dark 13 and 24 go dark I don't use the fibers on the ends and I use 10 in the middle the top row for our X the bottom for TX and I wouldn't get too hung up on you know whether our X's on top or bottom because again when we start talking about these trunk cables is their key type or key down you're rolling that so in one instance it looks like our X's on the top and T X's on the bottom when I roll that cable over to do my flipping they change places so I think the important thing to think about is I'm using 10 fibers a 10 gigabits per lane to get 100 bit gigabit connectivity or 100 Gigabit Ethernet that may be the end of the story we certainly have the cassettes we have the trunk cables we have the you know infrastructure for that we're just waiting for the electronics to catch up and for them to be affordable but there's one little s last bit at the bottom that I want to share with you and we think this is where a hundred bit gigabits going sure there will be some people who can say look I've already got these 24 fiber cassette and I can hook this thing up and make a hundred gigabit connection I think that's true but what we think is going to happen is they're you know we're becoming limited here pretty quickly as you can imagine 100 gigabit sure that's pretty far out and that's a lot of speed but speed needs change in a hurry don't they and one of these days five years from now ten years from now honey gigabits per second is going to not seem all that incredible anymore so we need some different advances in electronics where we think it's going is down below you see an illustration I have that looks remarkably similar to the 40 gigabit 12 v rmp and say it as well how is that going to work well the electronics manufacturers right now are working on changing the electronics up using what we call WDS or wave division multiplexing so that's a big word but all it really means is using different wavelengths or colors of light to send multiple signals at the same time down this single fiber combining wave division multiplexing with some increases in in the speed of our electronics will allow us to change the way fiber electronics work instead of 10 gigabits per lane which we use today all over the place in our very first example up there each one of those just 10 gigs per Lane we expect it to jump up to 25 gigs of lane that changes that the outlook of where do you go with 100 gig because now 25 gigabits per Lane times 4 is 100 gigabits and because it looks remarkably similar to 40 gig think of the advantages I want it I want to upgrade my data center I'm not there's no such thing as a hundred gig and I don't really need the electronics yet but I am ready to move to 40 gig what do I buy if you subscribe to the idea that we're going to have the ability to do 25 gigs per Lane in the future i buy 24 v rmp o cassettes and configure my network that way when i want to move to a hundred gig there's nothing to do there's no cables to rewire everything is already wired right to do 40 X and for our X from 40 gig I just swap out my electronics and in theory I get a hundred good connectivity so we think that that's probably the way to go if you know for those folks who thinking that you know what what does the hundred gigabit world look like we think it's going to be you know centered around this 12 v or MPO at 25 gigs per Lane but again we do still carry a 24 v or MPO and this for the reasons that we talked about you know in a in a 10 gig world and maybe potentially even a 40 gig world it does make sense for us you know for those simple point-to-point applications so we'll have to see those bodies are still meeting now and we're expecting to see some of the stuff out of the 802 2.3 so it's B Q is the OEE spec that they're working on now something should come out early next year and that's what we hear and that might give us a little better indication about you know whether the electronics and components manufacturers have kind of settled into that 25 gigs per Lane yet or not so having said that that's into my presentation thank you for viewing our webinar on the evolution of MPO style multi-fiber array connectivity I hope you found it informative for additional information on black boxes MTP solutions please go to our website at black box comm slash MTP

Channel: Black Box

Views: 22,092

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Black Box Corporation, fiber cable, MPO, MTP, connectors, data center

Id: EnkzMKGtYb8

Length: 38min 32sec (2312 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 17 2014