Comment by iso1631
3 hours ago
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.
If you start doing bonded links with DACs or if you have a bunch of servers, the cable management situation gets ugly in a hurry, and a lot of the usual solutions like patch panels and keystones aren't applicable. Source: my basement
Yep, I did this for my little DGx spark cluster because 100-200gb copper cables are very thick, heavy, and annoying.