End-of-row and middle-of-row switching combined account for 20 percent. When BSRIA surveyed enterprise data center operators, it found that 42 percent use a top-of-rack switching architecture. With cabling channel lengths supported up to 100 meters and transceiver costs well below that of optical fiber, Category 6A and higher copper cabling is currently well suited to support a variety of architectures for switch-to-server connections, including top of rack, middle of row, and end of row scenarios.” The authors state, “The ability of twisted-pair copper cabling to support speeds of 10 Gbits/sec makes it the preferred choice for today’s data center switch-to-server connections. Among the topics are data center environments and architectures. Where do we go from here?” The paper covers a number of topics on cabling media and applications. Siemon’s Valerie Maguire and Betsy Conroy recently authored a paper titled “The copper vs. The speeds and architectures of switch-to-server connections are several, and common setups include top-of-rack, end-of-row, and middle-of-row. Yet those switch-to-server connections are commonly referred to as “edge” connections, and are vital because servers are, for practical purposes, clients’ interface with the data center.

From the standpoint of speed, switch-to-switch connections serve as the backhaul or backbone, and as such typically are multiple times the speed of switch-to-server connections. But that fact should not be interpreted to mean they are the least important. In data center architectures, switch-to-server connections traditionally are the lowest-speed connections.

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