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I'm in the process of building out a small datacenter ( about 10 racks ) and it feels like the fiber connections for storage and 10G ethernet are really piling up.

Does anyone have any products they've been happy with for managing fiber rack to rack, or providing a central distribution point? I'm looking at a few products, but it'd be nice to hear some real world experiences.

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    Could you give us more information about it feels like the fiber connections for storage and 10G ethernet are really piling up? That's a bit unclear about what the nature of the problem is... picture might help a lot
    – Mike Pennington
    Jun 18, 2013 at 20:58
  • meta.networkengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/8/…
    – jwbensley
    Jun 19, 2013 at 8:23
  • @javano, I don't believe the OP is necessarily asking about a specific product. Also, both answers may point to a vendor and/or product line, but neither point to any specific products.
    – YLearn
    Jun 19, 2013 at 13:21
  • IMO this question doesn't really align itself with being able to receive a specific answer and is more "polling" than anything else. No, there haven't been specific product recommendations, but as it stands the question is really more subjective and the answers will reflect this.
    – John Jensen
    Jun 19, 2013 at 14:05
  • one could also interpret this to be a question about best practices...
    – Craig Constantine
    Jun 19, 2013 at 14:50

2 Answers 2

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There are a number of companies that provide pre-terminated modular fiber solutions. I have used the CommScope/Systimax InstaPatch products in these types of situations before and had good luck with them. My personal preference is to pay a bit extra and go with a bigger or more established company when I am dealing with a data center. In any event, make sure it is at least a respectable company that you feel will be around in 5-10 years.

Distribution points are key but the actual design is entirely based on your need. I personally like a distribution point in each row (middle or end is design choice - I prefer end, but middle means average run length is a bit shorter), which also houses all the fiber runs between rows and/or to the main distribution frame.

However with only 10 racks, you could easily go with just a single distribution point.

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Just two remarks which might be useful:

We started using MTP recently (http://mtpfibersolutions.com/faqs-about-mtp-connectors/ for example, we got it from a local reseller), main consideration was that we needed more fibers in ducts which were pretty full already. Thanks to the thin fiber bundles we were able to add more fibers within limited space.

We always use main distribution points to avoid having to connect every rack with every other rack, which is usually costly (often only a few pairs of every bundle are used) and it easily becomes a mess due to the large number of bundles.

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