• Home
  • Who Am I ?
    • Contact
    • What does Ethereal Mind mean ?
  • Disclosure
    • Disclaimer
    • Comment Policy
    • Privacy Policy
  • Just Three
  • Archive

EtherealMind

Software Defined & Intent Based Networking

You are here: Home / Size Differences – Cat5 and Cat6 Cable Bundles

Size Differences – Cat5 and Cat6 Cable Bundles

14th July 2012 By Greg Ferro Filed Under: Blog, Operation

I’ve talked bit about the problems of using Category 6 copper cabling in the data centre. The sheer size and weight of the cable is a serious problem.

Here are my concerns ( discussed in more details here – Problems with Cat6A cables in the Data Centre:

  • High power consumption
  • large physical Cat6A cable size
  • poor mechanical properties of Cat6A copper
  • Unreliability of copper in terms of Bit Error Rates (BER) and long term electrical capability.

Take a look at this sample that I was able to access recently. The Category 6 cable is twice the size of the Cat5 cable and seems to weigh about twice as much!!

 

 This side view is more dramatic in showing the amount of physical space that a Category cable bundle needs:

This data centre decided to not use Cat6 cabling because the cost of enhancing the cable trays was more than the cost of using fibre optic or active coaxial cables. The requirements was to double the number of  cable trays around the data centre and the cost was excessive.

The EtherealMind View

This is one of those times that a cheap NIC will quickly cost more. It’s quite hard to explain this to managers, they simply aren’t bright enough to understand the maths involved here. And especially you can’t charge the extra cable trays to each individual project means that it’s a major infrastructure problems to get solved.

Hidden costs are still real and the long term impacts of Cat6 cabling are serious. Think carefully.

Disclosure

I have nothing to disclose in this article. My full disclosure statement is here

About Greg Ferro

Human Infrastructure for Data Networks. 25 year survivor of Corporate IT in many verticals, tens of employers working on a wide range of networking solutions and products.

Host of the Packet Pushers Podcast on data networking at http://packetpushers.net- now the largest networking podcast on the Internet.

My personal blog at http://gregferro.com

Comments

  1. Ryan Malayter says

    14th July 2012 at 21:48 +0100

    With 10G fiber *still* US$1000+ per link for optics and cabling, you’re going to see a lot of Cat6 and 10GBASE-T for a long time.

    • Chuck says

      14th July 2012 at 22:09 +0100

      Definitely. Some sort of standard around USR optics, and support for them for server to switch connectivity would go a long way. I’d much rather use USR optics than twinax even if the initial cost was a bit higher.

    • Julien Goodwin says

      15th July 2012 at 06:35 +0100

      Only if you’re buying vendor optics. OEM optics are ~$250 a link for multimode, ~$400 for singlemode, and fibre isn’t all that much.

      • Huittinen Massive says

        15th July 2012 at 10:36 +0100

        You can get LR 10G for 120USD pop. And SR for significantly less.

  2. Jason says

    15th July 2012 at 19:48 +0100

    I know your general concern and stance on Cat6A and general copper usage in the datacenter. You’re hoping for fiber everywhere, and I somewhat agree. I’m curious on your stance of using Twinax (10GSFP+Cu) for the short runs (you can somewhat count FET in this as well). Other comments in this thread have appropriately indicated that vendor transceivers are still ridiculously expensive. Also non-vendor supplied transceivers go for a lot less (but gets you in a little trouble sometimes when calling Cisco). But, using twinax is a relatively low cost alternative for 10G connectivity if less than 10 meters. This is sufficient for usually ToR or CoR designs for access connectivity and sometimes as a general interconnect (again if distance allows). It’s also much less power, as that has also been one of your concerns with T based connections.

Network Break Podcast

Network Break is round table podcast on news, views and industry events. Join Ethan, Drew and myself as we talk about what happened this week in networking. In the time it takes to have a coffee.

Packet Pushers Weekly

A podcast on Data Networking where we talk nerdy about technology, recent events, conduct interviews and more. We look at technology, the industry and our daily work lives every week.

Our motto: Too Much Networking Would Never Be Enough!

Find Me on Social Media

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Linkedin
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Return to top of page

Copyright Greg Ferro 2008-2017 - Thanks for reading my site, it's been good to have you here.

Opinions, Views and Ideas expressed here are my own and do not represent any employer, vendor or sponsor.Full disclosure