Three Components Used for Modular Patching Solutions

In the age of the Internet, data communication industry is moving forward at a rapid speed. The size of data centers becomes bigger and the cabling system becomes more complicated. To satisfy high speed data transmission, high-density cabling is easy to be found in data centers. For data center managers, they not only have to think about the right connections between devices, but also have to take cable management into consideration. If the cables are not managed well at the beginning, cable management will be a nightmare at last. Therefore, it is essential to quickly and effectively manage your data center cabling at the first step. But is there any component can function like that? This article is going to introduce three fiber optic components to you—fiber adapter panel, MTP cassette and fiber enclosure.

Preloaded with fiber adapters, the fiber adapter panel is designed to assure flexibility and ease of network deployment and facilitate structured infrastructure. It is commonly used in high-density network applications for cross connections in main distribution, horizontal distribution, and equipment distribution areas. In addition, fiber adapter panel ensures efficient use of space, quick deployment and the highest reliability for the lowest installed cost, which in turn provides a high return on investment. The commonly used fiber adapter panels are LC fiber adapter panels, SC fiber adapter panels and MTP fiber adapter panels. Here is a picture for you, and from MTP MTP adapter, we can figure out it is MTP adapter panel.

MTP cassette produced by many MPO MTP cassette manufacturers is usually fitted with 12 fibers or 24 fibers. Structured with LC or SC adapters on the front side of the cassette and MTP adapters at the rear of the cassette, MTP cassette provides secure transition between MTP and LC or SC discrete connectors. Therefore, it is commonly used to interconnect MTP backbones with LC or SC patching. The main advantage of MTP cassette is that it allows for rapid deployment of high density data center infrastructure as well as improved troubleshooting and reconfiguration during moves, adds and changes. You can have a better understanding of the inner structure of MTP cassette.

Fiber enclosure can provide easy-to-manage cabling environments and strong protection for fiber optic cables. Besides, it can largely increase the working efficiency and decrease the costs for labor and time.There are two widely used designs of fiber enclosure in general: wall mount fiber enclosure and rack mount fiber enclosure. Here I take FS.COM fiber enclosures (FHD-1UFCE, FHD-2UFCE, FHD-4UFCE) for example, these three types of FHD fiber enclosures are with the size of 1RU, 2RU and 4RU respectively, which you can learn about from the figure below. Made of black powder coated SPCC rugged heavy-duty steel, the FHD fiber enclosures are designed with push/pull out functions, and have flexible mounting options, which are suitable for 10G/40G/100G cabling deployment.

After getting a general understanding of fiber adapter panel, MTP cassette and FHD fiber enclosure, let’s come to how to use them in your network deployment. Usually, we have two modular patching solutions: fiber adapter panel with FHD fiber enclosure and MTP cassette with FHD fiber enclosure. When holding fiber adapter panels, FHD fiber enclosure can also hold fiber slack management spools to help manage the cables or optical splice trays to help store the spliced fiber pigtails. For example, besides housing the exact same number of fiber adapter panels, the FHD-1UFCE fiber enclosure can also hold two fiber slack management spools or four optical splice trays; the FHD-2UFCE fiber enclosure can hold two fiber slack management spools or eight optical splice trays; the FHD-4UFCE fiber enclosure can hold two fiber slack management spools or twelve optical splice trays. While when holding MTP cassettes, the number of MTP cassette increases with the expansion of the capacity of the FHD fiber enclosure. For example, the FHD-1UFCE fiber enclosure can hold up to four MTP cassettes; the FHD-2UFCE fiber enclosure eight MTP cassettes; the FHD-4UFCE fiber enclosure twelve MTP cassettes. However, if using FHD fiber enclosure with MTP cassettes, fiber slack management spools or optical splice trays cannot be installed inside the enclosure. As for which solution to choose, it all depends on your specific requirements of network deployment.

We know that how to quickly and effectively manage your data center cabling in the beginning is particularly important. Fiber adapter panel, MTP cassette and fiber enclosure can provide modular patching solutions for great capacity cabling management. And I hope this article is helpful for you.