Data Centre Optical Performance & Monitoring

Data Centers have become paramount in our network world with speed, complexity and importance growing steadily.

Whether the Data Centre is your own, or multi-tenant, testing & monitoring is a critical element in meeting SLAs and performance objectives.

With thousands of internal and external links, cables and connectors, each a potential point of failure, where do you test? The following is a brief list of some key use cases for Data Centre engineers.

Use Case 1: Data Centre Interconnect or Customer to Data Centre

Problem: Testing the circuits between racks, between two Data Centres or from Data Centre to Customer as per the protocols / line rates to verify performance meets SLAs.
Solution: The Viavi MTS-5800 can run end to end tests up to 100G line rate. Example test standards: BERT, RFC-2544, Y1564 and RFC-6349 TCP Throughput.

Use Case 2: Optical Performance and Security of the Link

Problem: Constantly monitor your fibre links and be alerted to any fibre degradation or intrusion, including pinpointing the location.
Solution: Viavi’s SmartOTU is a rack mounted fibre monitor which can instantly alert staff when a fibre event occurs, be it degradation, a flapping connection or physical tapping into a fibre. As exact GPS location is provided faults can be located in minutes thus reducing mean time to repair.

Use Case 3: Active Optical Cable/Direct Attach Cable

Problem: AOC (Active Optical Cables) and DAC (Direct Attach Cables) are commonly used in Data Centre inter-rack connections to facilitate high speeds. Although a potential source of issues they can’t be tested easily as they’re terminated with cages like QSFP or SFP. Replacement is expensive.
Solution: Perform a transmission rate test (BERT) to verify performance of the cable – the Viavi MTS-5800 offers a script to quickly test and provide Pass/Fail.

Use Case 4: Optics SFP/QSFP Test

Problem: Pluggable optics like SFP or QSFP can be a common source of issues. When suspected as defective, they are just swapped out and discarded.
Solution: The Viavi MTS-5800 has an Optics self-test function that fully tests transceiver devices.

Use Case 5: Data Centre Interconnect using WDM Techologies

Problem: Noisy channels will result in poor WDM performance.
Solution: The Viavi MTS-6000/8000 has optical spectrum analysis modules providing testing of WDM interconnects to ensure clean, noise free channels for fast data rates.