Is there anything lasers can't do?

Dan Ragle at the mothership spotlighted Finisar in his weekly eITplanet Toolkit . You see, the company's has a green pitch for all of you running HPC clusters: fiber is better than copper for 10 GbE networking.

Increasingly popular, 10 Gig Ethernet connections and communications may actually help to reduce overall power consumption in the data center (by reducing the number of ports and/or switches necessary to accommodate the same amount of network traffic), but Finisar says the copper cabling typically used to deploy 10 Gig fabrics may require more power utilization than what is strictly necessary. Instead, their new Laserwire cables are both lighter and less power-hungry than their copper counterparts, with the vendor claiming that their cables consume nearly 95% less power than copper-based 10GBase-T deployments.

Additionally, Finisar notes that the fiber-optic Laserwire cables can be run for longer distances than copper; with initial entries expected to be offered in 3, 5, 10, and 30 meter flavors (with longer distances available upon request).

"A lot of good it does my copper network," you're probably thinking. Not so! The company has also cooked up some SFP+ and XFP adapter modules. Still, you'll have to wait until 2008 before the lithe new cables become available.