Siemens has bolstered its Sinamics S120 modular drives system with support for industrial Ethernet protocols, providing networking capability that will allow manufacturers to create a single network for factories and plants.

The Sinamics drive family now offers direct connectivity to both Profinet and Ethernet/IP, the two main protocols being used in the manufacturing industry to connect systems and devices across factories and plants, according to Siemens.

Now that 100G optical units are entering volume deployment, 400G is very clearly on the horizon. As recently reported here, the push is now officially “on” for 400-Gigabit Ethernet standard. Additionally, a new white paper from Fujitsu US summarizes the progress and direction of efforts to develop and implement this next generation of high-speed optical networking technology.

“The industry is trying to avoid the mistakes made with 40G optics, which lacked any industry standards,” notes Fujitsu. “As a result, an alphabet soup of five or six different 40G modulation techniques were developed by vendors, resulting in a very fractured 40G component industry, low component volumes, lack of compatible dual sources for 40G components, and few cost reductions or volume efficiencies. Fortunately, these mistakes were avoided at 100G through a common industry approach, standardized within the OIF.”

Data centers are the central location for data interchange and are found in enterprises, government offices, schools, universities, hospitals, and other networked server farms.

The ease of turning nearly any location into an information interchange hub has been enabled by the development of array-based fiber optic cabling systems. Ribbon fiber cables, array-based fiber connectors, and packaged breakout assemblies (i.e., cassettes) provide modular small form factor connectivity and enable fast, reliable interconnection of fiber optic links in high-density data center environments.

Once the decision has been made to deploy array-based fiber connectivity, care must be taken to ensure the integrity of connections between the transmitting optical light source and the receiving photo detector.

The objective of polarity is simple: provide transmit-to-receive connections across the entire fiber optic system in a consistent, standards-based manner.

Ensuring polarity of array-based systems requires careful planning. The end-user is best served by network designs that follow a single method that maintains polarity now over serial fiber channels and can migrate to
parallel optics in support of very high data rates (40-100+ Gb/s) in the future.

This paper describes recently published industry guidelines that address polarity across array-based fiber systems, and discusses the advantages and drawbacks of the three TIA/EIA recommended methods.

Using Panduit’s Signature Core fiber-optic cabling system with the Avago QSFP+ eSR4 pluggable, parallel fiber-optics modules, a reach of 550 meters is now guaranteed for 40 Gigabit Ethernet (40GbE) over multimode fiber links by Panduit.

“Avago introduced the 40 Gigabit Ethernet eSR4 modules to provide a migration path for data centers to upgrade from 10G to 40G Ethernet and span longer reaches,”

Avago’s QSFP+ eSR4 is a four-channel, pluggable, parallel, fiber-optic QSFP+ transceiver for 40GbE for extended reach applications

The module iintegrates four data lanes in each direction with each lane operating at 10.3125Gb/s, giving an aggregated bandwidth of 40Gb/s, and also can be used for high density 10 gigabit Ethernet applications.

The QSFP+ eSR4 modules are warranteed by Avago to 400m multimode fiber link distances based upon generic industry fiber standards. With Panduit’s Signature Core system, the reach of certain links has been measured to extend beyond 550 m.

As reported by Cabling Installation & Maintenance’s sister site, Lightwave, Germany’s Deutsche Telekom says it has linked research and education sites in Geneva and Budapest with a high-speed, 100G data connection. The new Ethernet link connects the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) data center in Geneva and a newly established, remote data center operated by Wigner Research Centre for Physics in the Hungarian capital of Budapest.

Deutsche Telekom began testing its 100-Gbps transmission services in 2010. T-Systems deployed a 100-Gbps link in Germany using gear from Alcatel-Lucent that same year.

The company says its 100-/40-GbE XL switch modules help to scale networks for a variety of highly virtualized multi-tenant cloud data centers, Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), Virtual Machines (VMs) and data center core deployments. The capability to scale to a million route entries, addresses and flows, and to logically segment multi-tenant networks with L2 broadcast domains are critical elements in building next-generation data center networks, contends the company.

Leveraging its open, modular ExtremeXOS operating system, the company has concurrently announced support of two Software Defined Networking (SDN) applications.

The Telecommunications Industry Association’s (TIA) TR-42.7 Telecommunications Copper Cabling Systems Subcommittee is seeking input from industry professionals on the planned lengths of specific data center links. The subcommittee will use the data collected in the development of next-generation cabling and application standards.

As we have reported, TR-42.7 recently decided to move forward with a set of Category 8 specifications. From all indications, a Category 8 twisted-pair cabling system will support 40GBase-T links in data center environments. It also is almost assured that the link lengths to which Category 8 will support 40GBase-T will be shorter than 100 meters.

Comtran Cable recently announced that because of improved geometric engineering, the company has been able to reduce the size of two of its highest-performing unshielded twisted-pair cables. Comtran’s Category 6 cable as well as its enhanced Category 6 cable (which it dubs Cat 6e and tests to 550 MHz) have been reduced in outside diameter.

The company explains: “The improved design has allowed Comtran to remove the tape separator in the Cat 6 cable completely, as well as replace the crossweb from the Cat 6e 550MHz cable with a small separator tape.”

The plenum (CMP) rated Category 6 cable now has an outside diameter of 0.190 inches and the riser (CMR) rated Category 6 has a 0.200-inch OD