Finisar Corporation has released new serial 10 Gbps active optical cable designed to accelerate and support 10G Ethernet server connectivity.
The Laserwire family consists of the Laserwire cable, a high density electrical connector and 10G Ethernet adapter modules to facilitate adoption into legacy transceiver ports.
Laserwire utilises fibre optic technology for the transmission of data while reducing the weight, density and power consumption of copper wire.
The burden of copper:
Today, supercomputing clusters are hampered by the physical burdens of CX-4 copper cable. In addition to being large, heavy, power hungry and expensive, copper cable is limited to short distance connections, as data integrity deteriorates over long distances.
By comparison, the Laserwire cable assembly is a fibre optic cable so it is small, light and much lower in power consumption.
The fibre optic cable also allows a smaller bend radius, thus providing greater flexibility during the installation of computer clusters.
The Laserwire electrical connector was specifically developed for high density applications and can support large cluster configurations, including 48 port 1U switches.
The connector can also be mounted in space-constrained LOM (LAN on motherboard) designs.
As 10 Gig servers become more prevalent in the data centre, power and 10 Gig interconnect cost became a significant challenge, as does connecting these servers in a way that allows organisations to optimise their computing power.
The Force10 S2410 provides high density 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity that enables organisations to directly connect to 10 Gig servers while Laserwire delivers the low power and low cost plug and play interconnect that organisations need to efficiently utilise increased computing resources.
Laserwire consumes nearly 95% less power, resulting in lower heat dissipation and reduced cooling requirements.
In addition to the Laserwire cable and connector, the family will include transceiver adapter modules that will enable Laserwire to plug into traditional optical transceiver ports. This will allow system builders and data centres to use Laserwire in legacy systems for 10GbE connectivity.
The server connectivity transition to 10GbE is still in its early stages with 10GbE NICs shipped into midrange and high end Unix servers, networked storage systems and HPC applications.
With the move of 10GbE into high volume server platforms, users need Laserwire to provide a viable interconnect solution to address the current copper issues of port density, power consumption and cost.
Laserwire has various practical applications beyond high performance computing, including Enterprise data centres, video, consumer and industrial applications.
The Laserwire cable assembly is available from Caelera.