Comment by jeffrallen

4 hours ago

Nope. For production, you want to reduce risk and variation. DACs are already available in about 5 sizes up to the max 7m length, why would you terminate any other size in the field?

I did spec a couple of 7m dacs a few months ago to run between two adjacent bays, but normally for more than 2m I'll just drop a SM sfp and run a preterminated fibre cable.

In the field its the armoured fibre on a reel, 100m, 200m, 500m etc, with opticon connectors, or some normal cat5 typically for APs

  • Some network guys I know prefer fibre even within the rack, just because they don't want the weight and the obstructions in the rack. Apparently more than once the weight of the DACs and the bulk of the cable bundle has caused a problem with NICs.

    Personally that surprised me, but I can see where they're coming from.

    • Yep, I did this for my little DGx spark cluster because 100-200gb copper cables are very thick, heavy, and annoying.