The amount of data that can be transferred over even simple unshielded twisted-pair cables has increased dramatically over the last few years.Many experts in the late 1980s believed that UTP cables would not support data rates in excess of 10Mbps.

Why 10G Copper SFP+ transceiver is good option to have, but can’t be recommended for mass scale data center deployments? Already more than year 10G Copper SFP+ transceivers have become widely available for networking industry. Also we see raising demand for this product and most popular devices currently are Cisco Nexus 3500 series and HPE FlexFabric 5930 Switch Series, where both are popular choice as ToR (Top of the Rack) switches in data center environment. ToR switches typically focus on providing high-density of 10G/40G ports and focusing on ultra-low-latency L2/L3 data processing within data center environment. 10G Copper SFP+ transceiver are enabling ability to use Cat 6a/7 copper cables for 10G connectivity in data centers. Wait a minute! Legacy copper cables in modern data centers…?

On March 2013 Cisco announced launch of it’s proprietary 100G optical transceiver module called CPAK. Unless other pluggable optic form-factors like XFP, SFP+, QSFP, CFP, CFP2/4 with are industry standard (Multi-Source Agreement MSA), CPAK is totally Cisco proprietary.

Already for some time tunable optical transceivers for use in DWDM systems, such as XFP and SFP+ are available for optical networking industry. Current evolution of tunable optical transceivers typically support full ITU-T C-band, allowing dynamically tune transmitter wavelength with 50GHz steps. However, even longer time conventional or fixed wavelength DWDM transceivers are in market. We feel that some of our customers are puzzled about choosing between fixed and tunable optical transceivers. I will try to shed some light on this by expressing my opinion.