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With the ever changing internet landscape and demand for high speed and reliability, the data networks majorly rely on the underlying hardware to meet up the user requirements. The days are gone when a Fast Ethernet (100Mbps) would be considered more than sufficient for the network backbone. In today’s scenario even a 40Gbps would fall short of the Network Engineers expectations. Underlying hardware performance also had to increase to support the demand for ever increasing speed.
The latest deployed systems use Transceivers capable of supporting I/O speeds up to 100Gbps.
There are different types of Transceivers available in the market today which can be used in a wide variety of applications. Some of the major types are listed below:
- 1. SFP - Small Form-Factor Pluggable is a compact and hot-pluggable Transceiver used for telecommunication and data communication. It is used as an interface between a network device hardware (like switches, routers, etc.) and other fiber-optics or copper networking cable.
- 2. XFP - It is a hot pluggable and protocol independent Transceiver, supporting data speeds of up to 10Gbps. It helps to optimize cost and power consumption.
- 3. SFP+ - The next generation of SFP-Transceivers. It is designed to support medium data rates up to 10Gbps. It is designed to have a higher port density as compared to XFP Transceivers.
- 4. QSFP - Quad Small Formfactor Pluggable, it is basically four SFP+ connections crammed in a single Transceiver. The basic format supports up to 40Gbps on Ethernet or Fibre Channel along with Sonet and Infiband applications.
- 5. QSFP28 – Advanced version of QSFP. Currently provides the highest speed which allows four simultaneous 28Gbps connections or a total of 112Gbps.
With the advent of the 100G standard for Ethernet networks 100G QSFP28 Transceiver has emerged as the latest and fastest providing low cost, improved density and power consumption. It has been implemented using 4x25Gbps lanes. It is fast becoming the universal Data Center form factor.
The QSFP28 Transceiver increases the front panel density by over 250% as compared to QSFP. The form-factor is the same and the maximum number of ports is the same, but the lane speeds are increased from 4x10Gbps to 4x25Gbps. As in QSFP with QSFP28 the same form factor and supports the same cables. For the first generation of 100G switches and routers, a small CXP form factor was used for cabling, either CFP or CFP2 used to be the Transceivers. Because of this the equipment designer used to make huge sacrifices. Data Centers with single-mode fibers could not use a switch with CXP ports, a router with CFP2 or CPAK ports was limited in bandwidth by the 8-10 ports that could fit on the front panel.
QSFP28 resolved this problem. Now an 1 RU (Rack Unit) switch can have up to 36 QSFP ports on the front face plate and can have many varieties of Transceivers or cables plugged into them. They are mainly used for interconnection between large switches and routers or within the racks of Data Centers. QSFP28-Transceiver come in two varieties:
- 1. Based on VCSEL (Vertical-cavity surface emitting laser) - They are useful for shorter distances or multi mode fiber.
- 2. Based on CWDM TOSA – They are useful for longer distances on Single Mode Fiber. They can support any Data Center reach of 2KM or more and provide a high degree of integration, the CMOS chips are small enough to fit within a QSFP28 package. It is low power and WDM designs can fit within the 3.5W maximum of QSFP28.
To conclude 100G QSFP28 Transceiver is going to revolutionize the Small Form-factor Transceiver-technology and is going to feature in all the coming generations of high speed switches, routers etc. ensuring that the data centers can scale to 100G networks with the simplicity as 10G networks.
