Product category:
Optical Fibres, Cables and Connectors
News Release from: Finisar Corp | Subject: Laserwire cable
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 13 November 2007
Optical cables slash power needs
Laserwire uses fibre optic technology for the transmission of data while reducing the weight, density and power consumption of copper wire.
Finisar has released the industry's first serial 10Gbit/s active optical cable family 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
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 18 Sep 2007 at 8.00am (UK)
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Laserwire uses fibre optic technology for the transmission of data while reducing the weight, density and power consumption of copper wire.
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.
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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.
Stephen Garrison, Vice President of Marketing at Force10 Networks said "The Force10 S2410 provides high-density 10Gbit Ethernet connectivity that enables organisations to directly connect to 10G servers while Laserwire delivers the low power and low cost 'plug and play' interconnect that organisations need to efficiently use increased computing resources".
Laserwire significantly reduces power in datacentre applications.
When compared with 10GBase-T solutions, 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 most 10GbE NICs shipped into midrange and high-end Unix servers, networked storage systems and HPC applications, " said Bob Wheeler, Senior Analyst with The Linley Group.
"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 is the answer to many of the physical challenges plaguing high-performance supercomputing clusters today", said Jan Meise, Director of Strategic Marketing at Finisar.
"By incorporating Finisar's two decades of expertise in the fibre optics industry, we have been able to develop a product that directly addresses end-user concerns to provide a lower cost, more power efficient alternative to copper cable".
"Additionally, we see Laserwire as having various practical applications beyond high-performance Computing, including Enterprise data centres, video, consumer and industrial applications".
Finisar expects to see first HPC installations with components of the Laserwire family in 2008.
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