How far can the copper cable wiring go?

First, the preface

In the context of the large increase of global data traffic, data center construction tends to the direction of cloud computing, while the cloud Computing data Center will use 10G, even 40g/100g and other high-speed network applications based on fiber transmission, and the application of virtualization technology also put forward higher requirements for network transmission, Presents new opportunities for the application of optical fiber systems. While China's national standards "residential and residential buildings in the optical fiber to the household Communication facilities Engineering Design Code" will be promulgated, fiber-optic to the application of more government policy support, the "light into the copper retreat" process seems to have taken an important step forward.

When we pay attention to all the above a lot of industry dynamics and information, whether it indicates that the copper cable wiring has gradually come to an end? In view of this conjecture, we will analyze the market change and development direction of the copper cabling system from the development of the relevant standard of copper cabling and the use occasion.

Second, the standard development direction of copper cable wiring system

In the Gigabit 1000base-t and the following Ethernet transmission medium, CAT5e, Cat6 and so on copper twisted pair line has the absolute superiority, along with the copper cable twisted line as the transmission medium 10GB (million Gigabit) Ethernet IEEE 802.3an The 10GBASE-T specification was formally approved in June 2006, which supports the traditional twisted-pair cable with a standard RJ45 connector, which can be backward compatible with 1000BASE-T and the following Ethernet applications. CAT6A Copper cables can support the 10GBASE-T transmission distance of 100 meters, CAT6 twisted pair can support 37 meters of 10GBASE-T transmission, so that new users can use the original twisted-pair cable.

Progress from the 40G BASE-T Standard: IEEE802.3 was established in July 2012 NG BASE-T Research Group, the main point of the study is the data center shielding cable, focus on length, power consumption, etc., scheduled to be completed by the end of 2014, September 2015 vote, March 2016 official release; ISO/IEC TR 11801-99-x WD2 contains 2 parts: Support for CAT6A, CAT7 shielding devices, support for 25 m transmission, frequency range 1~1000mhz, and based on new devices to support 50 m transmission, frequency range 1~ 1600mhz/2000mhz;tia 42.7 Committee under the ansi/tia-568-c.2-1 to define the cable as CAT8, explicitly using the RJ45 interface, support channel length of 50 meters, link length of 40 meters, frequency range 1~2000mhz, Draft version 0.5 completed and completed by the end of 2013.

We from the ISO clear standard development direction, and did not see to abandon the copper cable to a higher level of development of the line, the development of standards has always been related to the application, the key is to see the specific application direction.

Application of copper cable cabling system in data center

In recent years, the rapid growth of global data traffic, many traditional data center network architecture has not been fully applicable to all types of data center requirements, in order to solve the relationship between the growth of data traffic and the speed of infrastructure development, with a large number of computing resources of the cloud Computing data center has been widely used, And will become an important development direction of data center construction in the future. With the wide application of new technologies such as virtualization in the data center, can the copper cabling system meet its transmission performance requirements?

3.1 Cabling systems for traditional data centers

In the construction of the traditional enterprise-class data center, more used is still more maintainable EOR (end of Row, such as figure I) network architecture, when the server is still using Gigabit Ethernet access, horizontal wiring area HDA and equipment wiring area between EDA, usually deploy a large number of horizontal copper twisted pair.

Figure A EOR network architecture

As the new application of data flow is increasing, based on the EOR architecture of the data center will gradually upgrade to million, the current mainstream million network standards are mainly two: based on copper twisted pair, equipment interface type of RJ45 10gbase-t, and based on 850nm multimode (million) optical cable, The device interface type is the 10GBASE-SR of the LC. The use of 10gbase-t in the initial cost of investment has a small advantage, but the port energy consumption, currently about 2-3 times the 10GBASE-SR, due to data center for energy consumption concerns, based on copper twisted pair of 10GBASE-T network port in the current and in the future for some time not much advantage , after the data center upgrade million trillion, the copper cable application volume of the data center based on EOR will be reduced greatly.