Fields of Fiber

Enterprises are re-evaluating their data center infrastructure in unprecedented numbers, as hybrid cloud makes its way into real-world applications and early adopters display the benefits of moving to more flexible SDN architectures. The ability to rapidly reconfigure a network, or recreate network scenarios under software control is essential to thoroughly test the options available from multiple vendors or provide continuous delivery where applications move from development to test to production on a daily or even more frequent basis. One key element of this fluid approach to IT is test automation and the ability to recreate network, server and storage scenarios as required.

Cross connect in seconds instead of days or weeks:

The cost and time involved in provisioning cross connects within multi-tenant colocation data centers is one of the biggest frustrations for the businesses they serve. The standard process requires manual provisioning by on-site technicians, and takes days or even weeks to complete even when everything goes smoothly.

If there’s one thing that every IT administrator is looking for these days, it’s clear network visibility, which is imperative for maintaining a stable and secure data environment.

Two technologies that IT professionals use for network visibility are test access ports (TAPs) and switched port analyzers (SPANs), the latter of which supports a process referred to as port mirroring.

Here’s how these two technologies work:

Fiber Mountain OPX measured at 5 nanosecond port-to-port latency, to one or many output destinations

A significant and important performance metric in any network is latency, or the time taken for information to be relayed from an input port to an output port. There have been many industry papers written on the topic, and recent advances in computing performance, storage performance and network bandwidth bring greater focus to the impact of latency on user experience and application performance.