Yinglin (Frank) Yang, Technical Marketing Manager of the Enterprise Data Center Business Unit with CommScope (www.commscope.com), says:

A high-performance network infrastructure is useful in today’s enterprise because of the trends of consolidation, virtualization and convergence. All three require a high-performance infrastructure, because it can provide not only high bandwidth but low latency as well. From an application perspective, the operations of high-performance computing, virtualization and cloud computing will be optimized if a high-performance network infrastructure is provided.

Small to mid-sized enterprises tend to be more cost sensitive than large enterprises; however, they also need to be competitive and their data centers/IT infrastructures need to be as efficient as possible. CommScope’s 10Gb/s UTP solution provides cost effective and standard compliant cabling infrastructure, enabling virtualization and converged networks. Virtualization and converged networks can provide efficiency, resulting in cost reduction in both OpEx and CapEx. For example, the network architecture of running iSCSI storage area network (SAN) on top of 10GBASE-T Ethernet over CommScope’s 10Gb/s UTP solution is a converged network that has cost benefits in addition to high performance.

CommScope’s 10Gb/s UTP solution is a high performance unshielded twisted pair (UTP) cabling solution that enables 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) operation over unshielded twisted pair copper media. It supports 10GbE up to 100 meters and is a standard compliant (Category 6A/Class EA and IEEE Std. 802.3anTM-2006 [10GBASE-T standard]) copper cabling solution. It also supports Energy-efficient Ethernet, making it a “green technology.” It supports Power over Ethernet and Power over Ethernet Plus, and CommScope 10Gb/s UTP solution is also backward compatible with a 10, 100 and 1000 mbps Ethernet. This puts CommScope’s 10Gb/s UTP solution in the perfect position to help end users migrate from today’s 1Gb/s to 10Gb/s in the future.

I believe this will be the year for 10G over twisted pair copper cabling (i.e., CommScope’s 10Gb/s UTP solution) to take off. With 40G/100G technology on the horizon, deploying 10G UTP cabling infrastructure for servers and OM4 multi-mode fiber cabling for 40G/100G for uplinks and backbone is the right way to go.