By: Gina Fallon, VSS Product Management
If you have ever had to do split ratio calculations for passively tapping network links, you have a tendency to want to pull your hair out over the mathematical Olympics required. When you have to deal with low optical budgets, it takes the challenge even a step closer to the tipping point where there is no budget left to establish link with the network device and/or probe attached to the passive tap. The most common offenders are 10G & 40G Multimode where Cisco’s 40G Multimode BiDi (40GbaseSR2) budget is so tight it is not even recommended for passive tapping at all.
The solution is to go to active optical tapping. These taps don’t employ optical splitters (which have inherent insertion loss) and actually regenerate the optical signal on both the network and monitor transmit sides. VSS Monitoring offers vBroker Series products with PowerSafe chassis modules which also offer layer 1 Fail Open/Close state configurability if there is power loss or as a manual force Fail Open option during power on and a full range of optic technology support (10G MM, 40G MM, 40G MM BiDi, 40G SM, etc.).
Check out our full technical write up here: Tapping Low Optical Budget Links
