Fiber. Great In Your Diet. Costly In Your Data Center.

Guest Blog by Pat Chou, TMG Product Manager

Since the introduction of the Cisco’s 40G QSFP BiDi (Quad Small Form-Factor Pluggable Bidirectional module), we’ve seen phenomenal growth and adoption. I guess people do see the benefit.

What’s that? You haven’t heard?

…Ok, let’s say you’re in charge of a data center and your boss reminds you that streaming video and IoT devices are all the rage and if you don’t keep up with bandwidth demand, you’re toast. You have 10G links that use 10G SFP+ SR transceivers at the aggregation layer. You upgrade your switches or linecards to ones that have 40G QSFP ports like the Nexus series switches.

You now have a couple of choices for the QSFP ports: You could use QSFP SR4 transceivers, which requires ribbon fiber. That means you’d have to install more trunk fiber and modify patch panels to handle the MPO (Multi-Fiber Push On) connectors. Or you could use the QSFP BiDi transceiver, which, by the way, costs less than the SR4 transceiver. All you have to do is unplug the dual fiber MMF (Multi-Mode Fiber) cable that you already have in place, and plug it right into the BiDi. No hassle. Boss happy. Seems obvious, doesn’t it?

In this video Gary learns about this from his wife Helen. Thanks to QSFP 40G BiDi for helping them find bliss.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn0145lnoNk

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