Last week I posted a blog about what is driving the adoption of high density fiber enclosures. High density fiber enclosures can help reduce the high cost of real estate. Possibly, one might find themselves with a data center where space is constrained so a high density fiber enclosure can help ease those space constraints. I also said that high density fiber enclosures are used in data centers that are revenue generators because they make it possible to include more revenue-generating active equipment.
So a high density fiber enclosure helps add more equipment to a finite amount of space, but, as they say, there is no free lunch.
A typical high density fiber enclosure can deploy 72 duplex LC ports in the space of 1 RU. Using that metric, a patch field or cross connect that takes up half of a cabinet would need about 290, 12-fiber trunks. That is the good news. The bad news is all that fiber in a small amount of space creates problems when changes need to be made to the network.
All of that fiber behind the enclosure must be stored somewhere, and usually that is directly behind the enclosure. That makes it nearly impossible to reach in and remove a cassette, and even if you can, you will most likely disturb active circuits that are near the cassette that you are trying to move. The same is true for the front side of the enclosure. The number of fiber patch cords makes it extremely difficult to pull out a drawer if one needs to make a change. So, although one may be able to deploy a high density fiber enclosure, it is nearly impossible to manage.
At Panduit, we recognized this problem and it was at the top of our minds when we designed our new HD Flex™ Fiber Cabling System.
With the HD Flex Fiber Cabling System, the fiber management at the rear of the enclosure is all off to the side removing the big pile of slack fiber from the rear of the enclosure. The trays used in the HD Flex Enclosure are split, or only half as wide as the enclosure itself. This makes it easier to slide the tray in and out when they are fully populated with cassettes or adapter panels.
Please go to the HD Flex landing page on our web site to see how our high density fiber cabling system solves your real world problems.
