company news about What is the “Cloud” and why do I need Fiber to get there?

 

Data centers of the past were copper-based with multiple DS1 and Digital Signal 3 (DS3, 45 Mbits/sec) lines handling the load of servers to an Optical Carrier 3 (OC3, 155 Mbits/sec). This OC3 would connect the servers to the network cloud or outside world. Copper dominated in a data center environment and the only fiber installed was that single line connecting the servers to the network cloud.

Today with applications such as iTunes, Netflix, Hulu and others and cloud computing/hosted servers, backup and storage, Microsoft CRM, hosted private branch exchanges (PBXs), web analysis tools and web hosting are driving enormous growth in data center server deployments. Data centers are offering rates at DS1, DS3, 5 Mbits/sec, 10 Mbits/sec, 20 Mbits/sec and up to an OC3, all connecting to the outside world via 10-Gbit Ethernet or 100-Gbit Ethernet connections from multiple providers. To alleviate risk, the data center architecture is evolving away from the previous copper DS1 and DS3 panels, to fiber panels with multiple connections to the client and to the cloud for redundancy.