Fibre Channel Cable Length

With the changes in cable quality om3 om4 the supported fibre channel distances have confused a few people so this will be a good reference doc to remember.

Fibre channel cable length.

Unless the cable is being lain long distance for a telecom company distance limits should never be an issue for single mode fiber. All cables are made with either madison turbo quad gold for 2gb s or turbo 100 for sfp sfp cables. In fact mds 9700 series mission critical directors are the only modular network devices in the industry that can provide port speeds starting from as low as 2 gbps fibre channel and reaching all the way up to 32 gbps fibre channel with 128 gbps connectivity technically possible with the same generation of asics. This specification is called modal bandwidth.

Fibre channel is a serial point to point protocol that transfers a ton of data super reliably using light over fibre cables. 3 4 there are various upper level protocols for fibre channel including two for block storage. Fibre channel deployment distances in enterprise data centers continue to focus on distances up to 100 meters. Cable manufacturers specify the highest frequency at which their cables will carry a signal of acceptable quality for one kilometer mhz km.

The 10 km maximum for a fibre channel connection assumes the use of single mode fiber which is usually only used for long runs such as to a remote mirror site. Fibre channel cables our innovative connector designs maximize performance with controlled impedence cross talk and skew characteristics as well as excellent emi isolation properties. The ratio expressed in db of incident power at one port to transmitted power at a different port when a component or assembly with defined ports is introduced in to a link or system. Fibre channel copper cables are twin axial type of cable transmitting twin ax cable has much less insertion loss up to much higher frequencies insertion loss.

We stock all major cable types including hssdb9 hssdc hssdc2 sfp versions in lengths up to 10m. This table authored by karl hohenauer just came into my inbox. Also available on ibm techdocs om1 cable is not recommended for 16gb s fc but is expected to operate up to 15m. Fibre channel cables cse offers custom configurations and lengths of fibre channel cables.

Om1 multimode fiber optic 300 meters om1 is the basic version of multi mode cable being able to maintain 1gb data speeds for up to 300 meters.