Older SC and PC-style fiber optic connectors had long dominated the industry when it came to connecting different pieces of equipment in a data center. Smaller LC adapters are small enough that they can more than double the number of fiber ports installed on a single unit of rack-mounted space. As a result, LC adapters are poised to take over the industry as they become increasingly reliable.
Contents
Increasing Uptime by Swapping Out Connectors
You envision a long night of work involving a crimping tool and a bench power supply whenever someone says they swapped out networking connectors. Prefabricated patch cords make this laborious process a thing of the past. Your technicians must acquire enough cords that feature modern connectors and attach them to newer networking cards.
Most rack-mounted installations make it easy to remove cards whenever necessary simply. Though you might want to temporarily disable any relevant connectivity features before disconnecting the obsolete circuit boards, you usually won’t run into any situations that require a complete restart. Once the new parts are in place, the servers they’re attached to will stay online longer.
Newer LC cables use high-end Lucent connectors, which are often faster than PC-style connectors in spite of their smaller size. Larger-diameter fiber optic cords are often faster than those with smaller diameters. This is because these lines offer more surface area to transmit data through. LC connectors can work with all of the lines in even the most demanding of these cords. That makes them an excellent option for those updating their connectors as part of an upgrade to their overall network topology.
Enhancing Connections with Fresh Jacks
Over time, jacks can start to break down, and so can the connector clips on the ends of your networking cables. Replacing existing SC and PC-type cables with newer LC models can dramatically improve packet signaling rates by making a much better connection with any rack-mounted cards they’re plugged into. So, for example, cords featuring these connectors may be fully compliant with the TIA-598 color-coding standards, so you won’t have to worry about attaching them to the wrong ports.
Ensuring there’s no impedance mismatch between the cords and the ports they’re jacked into will help reduce packet loss further once data gets sent down the line. It may even help to make the cords last longer due to a decreased risk of standing waves sticking in the lines as packets are passed back and forth. You’ll see the most dramatic gains on systems that have visibly broken connector teeth since these stand the most to benefit from connector upgrades.
Attaching Disparate Components Together with LC Cords
The most significant advantage of these cords is that you can use them to connect various types of devices together, regardless of whether they were designed to interface. Smart terminals and Unix-based news printers can plug directly into big iron systems using these flexible devices. In addition, members of an on-premise technical team can do all this work themselves without relying on any outside organization.
Assuming only compatible jacks are in use, the process should take less than a few minutes. It’s as simple as plugging in a few cords and refreshing the network interfaces exposed by each device that reports to the network stack. Detaching them is just as simple because merely disconnecting LC cords is enough to break the connection and force every client computer operating as part of a token ring to update its network list. If a connection came undone unexpectedly, then the rest of the network could keep in touch with all the devices still functioning. However, this shouldn’t happen often since LC connectors are relatively stable.
Considering how often you have to reattach your networking cables, it does pay to upgrade the connectors attached to them. Installing LC jacks can go a long way toward ensuring reliable data transmissions on both ends of every connection you make.
