Guide to Indoor Fiber Optic Cable Color Coding

[Rohit Kumar]

If fiber optic cable coding makes your head spin, we have a guide to the common colors and some suggestions for STH readers on what to use

The post Guide to Indoor Fiber Optic Cable Color Coding appeared first on ServeTheHome.

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[nerdalertdk]

Just use single mode for everything 10g much easier

 

[Evan]

Just use single mode for everything 10g much easier

And more expensive
Use lots of 100G BiDi on multi mode these days and a much better price than single mode.

 

[Evan]

IBM for a long time shipped orange colored OM3
You can usually but whatever you want in whatever color you wants from the cable makes even if not standard.
All I can say is pay close attention to what a cable really is as sometimes you get caught out.
It’s pretty fair to say those single mode is always yellow, seems they stick hard to that.

 

[tinfoil3d]

I didn't know you can work 100gigs over just duplex lc in mm... Well, there's AOC though which is either duplex or simplex inside. Maybe even multistrand. AOCs are really cost-effective afaik. Of DAC is cheap king, but personally for me using AOC(or fiber) offers added protection from surges.

 

[Evan]

I didn't know you can work 100gigs over just duplex lc in mm... Well, there's AOC though which is either duplex or simplex inside. Maybe even multistrand. AOCs are really cost-effective afaik. Of DAC is cheap king, but personally for me using AOC(or fiber) offers added protection from surges.

yep for a few years now. BiDi on MM is really popular, we use it for all our in datacenter 100G links like spine to leaf (top rack) switching.
and 25G to the server is very common now as well.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/interfaces-modules/transceiver-modules/at-a-glance-c45-740242.pdf

 

[tinfoil3d]

Wow, that's "holy .." moment for me. I can just use multifiber om3/4 then for everything, which reduces cooling costs lol. I've been under impression I absolutely need sm for 100g. I would still pull the sm cable between buildings to be future-proof for any higher speeds but since the distance is within 60m even om3 would have been okay.

 

[tinfoil3d]

Evan just want to make this clear for myself, you are using those 100g bidi mm in cisco equipment or in random qsfp28-taking stuff like mlnx nics and other branded switches?

 

[Evan]

Using in cisco/arista/mellanox/Aruba, but I think brocade/ruckus/Dell also supports them. Not sure about generics but I would assume so for the big hyperscalers as when I have seen all their racks it’s been multimode the whole rack for a few I have looked close enough at.

Most experience using the 40G BiDi and later 40/100G cisco ones. As is always the case the high speed the more sensitive to say dirty or poor contacts. Be that single or multimode. Just the way it it but will be a bit frustrating when you first get used to using high speed connections.

you will always need some single mode for external connections outside of your datacenter room and I much prefer to use single mode for any dwdm type connectons. If you think you need to soon go beyond 100G then you also have to either ie MPO-12 or duplex single mode fiber.

 

[tinfoil3d]

Thanks. I'll absolutely pull redundant set of cables, mm and sm in each path. I don't think I'll ever go beyond 100 but just a few years ago I was living on 1g unmanaged network and never felt even a slightest doubt something may be missing. Now business, noise and lightning protection requirements totally pushed me off to all-fiber setups, right now in my house, further on in a standalone micro-dc-like building that will be connected to my house.

 

[Evan]

My personal feeling is that 25G for servers will be around a while as will 100G uplinks on switches. I have seen a few instances where there is needs of multiple 400G links make sense but that is pretty specialized requirement for AI or big data interfacing.