 Tom here from Lawrence Systems, and we're going to talk about why copper is faster than fiber. If you want to learn more about my company, head over to LawrenceSystems.com. If you want to hire us, there's a hires button at the top. You can fill out the contact form or head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can continue the discussion and geek out about this. This is neat. So I did a video yesterday about fiber and SFP plus and 10 gig connections and showed some of the adapters and I have those same adapters in front of me still. But I said I didn't have the ability to really show latency differences between DAC versus fiber versus the UTP cable right here. Now, the first one we're going to throw out is this. This is not because of latency reasons. If we use the SFP module, SFP plus, or if it's directly built into the switch and you're doing UTP 10 gig, it is greatly convenient. Just snap it in. There's no delicate fiber things here to have to worry about getting dirty or clean for someone who will point that out on every one of my videos. I do where I touch fiber and leave them exposed. Hi, Corey. So this right here is the UTP cable and the muxing, demuxing of getting all the data and pushing it over this and then putting it back into the electrical signals that come over here creates a lot of latency. So while it does functionally work and you can use it, it's a solid, reliable way to use something in storage over UTP. It's not as ideal because of the latency you introduced there. We're always trying to get the latency lower and lower when especially you're talking about enterprise solutions. Now, also when it comes to the data center solutions, they're not using UTP cables for those because these are also used more wattage. And wattage, when you scale that out, you're like, hey, this only uses a small amount of power. Think about the quantity of connections in a data center and you can see this adds up and becomes one of those. Every minor problem gets scaled out when you build it big. So this is great. This is convenient. This is the easiest and simplest way and how I actually connect my office computer to my servers in the back because, well, it's really easy to run the cable, crimp it on there. I don't need to, I mean, don't get me wrong. This is really great, but if you want to run fiber properly, you could use things like a fusion splicer. No, they're not super hard to use, but they're more complicated than just crimping ends on cable. So throw these over here and we'll jump into these two. Now, the copper that's in here, these are direct-attach cables. So your DAG cables are generally no longer the need be. They do have some distance limitations and we do know, if someone's pointing out scientifically, yes, light does travel faster than electricity. That being said, it's not the light travel where the problem comes in. It's the conversion of the media types. Now, when you see some of these articles, you always have taken a context that when they were measured and what they're measuring with, versus we get better at making electronics faster. So these numbers can change. These are stuff I'll link to over from Arista, but, you know, all things are taken in consideration. But as of right now, DAG is still the winner here in January 2020 when it comes to low, low latency of your storage. Now, the sustained transfer is the same on both. You're going to get 10 gigs of sustained transfer. And that's great when you're watching a movie, but when you have things like data going back and forth, transactional data that has to do queries and requests, queries and response, we want that latency to be the absolute lowest because it may not even be 10 gigs at a time. It's very small packets. So all that little latency adds up because of the quantity of transactions at scale. And the folks over at Arista have a whole research they did on this and I'm going to leave a link to all this, but this is really cool. And I answered a question right at the top that I like. This is not clickbait. Copper is faster than fiber. So they have all the Y down below, but at least they start with that. And let's break down, you know, some of the testing they did. And what they do is they tested one, two, three and seven meter twin X cables. And they break down multi mode fiber and single mode fiber and the latency is introduced into them. And this is where things get a little bit different. Now we know if you're going to go distance, you have to use fiber because well, they only test twin X up to these shorter distances because twin X only is made for in rack or maybe next to rack distances, not all the way across the data center or to the next adjacent building. So you have to think about use case and scope for the desktop. Yes, UTP is good for the data center and we got to get it over to the next day center, running fiber in between them makes sense. But for inside the rack itself or maybe if you're just building a storage server, you're going to want to have that lowest latency between maybe your hypervisor system and however it's storing its data. So those queries can happen very fast. So they break down that. Now I want to jump over here. They have the cable latencies plotted out. So if we plot the results to fit a trend line, we get slopes and offsets. And then you can start to see, and this one right here being the twin axis, bottom one here, where the cable length only adds a little bit of latency. And generally, especially if you're just going, a server sitting on top of another server, you're going to use the shortest one possible, like the one meter, one, not the seven meter cable. And you can see that the really low latency comes in there. And there's also that power consideration I talked about. Dat cables do use less power than a fiber module. And let's jump down to finally the analysis. The trend lines above show single mode and multi-mode fiber have near identical latencies of 4.96 nanoseconds per meter. This is close to the oft-quoted five nanoseconds per meter for fiber. The latency for twin X copper shows at 4.60 nanoseconds per meter, faster by 400 picoseconds per meter. While also interesting is zero offset, when we extrapolate down to the hypothetical zero meter cable, the copper cables have a lower fixed offset compared with the fiber. Now go down here a little bit more, and this is one important thing I want to make sure. It is important for the right medium of the job, direct-text cables have a maximum reach of 7 to 10 meters, depending on devices being used compared to a 300 meter range for multi-mode fighter and a 10 kilometer range for the SMF. And if they use different ones, yes, I know there's ones on there and I specified what they were using. But in conclusion, direct-attached copper cables have the edge over both SMF and MFF when it comes to latency, and it's even more prominent in short cable runs because latency introduced by the SFP modules would drive the fiber. So, not just me babbling on, this is Arista Networks, who makes high-end enterprise networking equipment doing the testing to show you what and why it's faster. Now look, these are still, like I said, great solutions, and if you're building out your home lab or something like that, this is still, if you have to, just out of convenience, you're able to put the serves maybe in your basement and you want a fiber connection to a second server because you want that one not in your basement, where that one was, et cetera. Or even, you know, we run into this, we have a client who the design and layout of their building created a challenge, so they ended up with another server room that is not exactly next to the other one. It's not far, but it was either tear-down walls that were structural support walls or just run some fiber over and have data center kind of split. Maybe then, because of the distances that they are on each side of the building, you want to use fiber. So you have to think about the use case. But when you're doing with things just in a rack, this is still the winner and if it's all in one, and this scales upwards, by the way, someone's going to point out what you're talking about, 10 gig Tom, that's old news. What about the 40 gig or bigger connectors? Yes, those are still, DAC has got the same, those same issues have not really been overcome when you do this. When you're doing it in rack, these are affordable, they come in fixed length, they're not too hard to do cable management for and they look really cool when you plug a lot of them in. I won't lie about that. All right, and thanks. Leave comments below or head over to the forums for a more in-depth discussion. And thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you'd like to see more content from the channel, hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you'd like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out. If you'd like to hire us, head over to laurancesystems.com fill out our contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on. 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