Enterprise IT & data center
Campus, building backbone, data-center fabric, 1G access through 400G spine, multi-vendor compatible.
Enterprise networks are the longest-tail use case for optical transceivers, campuses, branch offices, IDF/MDF backbones, modest on-prem data centres, and an increasing share of 25G/100G fabric for compute-heavy workloads (VMware, OpenShift, Nutanix). The driver here is cost-per-port over a five-to-ten-year refresh cycle, plus multi-vendor compatibility as procurement teams negotiate across Cisco, Juniper, Arista, Dell, and Aruba.
Operating constraints
- Mixed-vendor switching estates, same SKU coded for multiple platforms over its lifetime
- Capital-budget pressure: OEM optics often double the cost of the switch
- Long replacement cycles (5–10 years) demand multi-year warranty coverage
- Greenfield vs. brownfield: matching existing fibre type (OM3 vs. OM4 vs. OS2) constrains SKU choice
- Refresh cycles: 10G → 25G server access, 40G → 100G fabric is the dominant 2024–2026 transition
Use cases
Campus access and distribution
1G/10G fibre uplinks from access switches to distribution, distribution to core. Multi-mode within buildings, single-mode between buildings or for longer building-internal runs. The bread-and-butter of enterprise transceiver demand.
Building backbones
IDF-to-MDF links typically over OS2 single-mode at 10G/25G. As 25G server NICs become standard, building backbones are upgrading to match.
Data-center fabric, spine-leaf
100G QSFP28 fabric is the current 2026 standard in enterprise DCs; 400G QSFP-DD spines are showing up in larger deployments. Breakout 4×25G is the common ToR topology.
Storage and hyperconverged
iSCSI, NVMe-oF, and VMware vSAN traffic at 25G/100G. RoCEv2 is increasingly common on vSAN and Nutanix; the optical layer needs clean DDM telemetry to operate the link inside RDMA error budgets.
Multi-site WAN and SD-WAN
Branch-to-HQ and branch-to-cloud links over MPLS, internet, or direct fibre. 1G/10G SFP+ at the edge, LR/ER variants for metro inter-site links.
Recommended SKUs for this segment
- NAP-SFPP-LR (10G campus backbone)
- NAP-SFP28-SR (25G ToR-to-server)
- NAP-SFP28-LR (25G campus distribution)
- NAP-QSFP28-LR4 (100G fabric)
- NAP-QSFPDD-DR4 (400G fabric, 4×100G breakout)
Design notes
- For a 5–10-year refresh, the Free Vendor & Compatibility Exchange Program meaningfully reduces over-ordering, same SKU re-codes across switch vendor transitions.
- Multi-mode fibre choice (OM3 vs. OM4 vs. OM5) constrains SR reach especially at 25G+, verify OM4 minimum for new pulls.
- 100G CWDM4 (MSA, 2 km) is often the right balance for in-DC fabric where LR4 (10 km) is overkill.
Designing a enterprise it & data center deployment?
Our pre-sales engineers will review your topology, fibre plant, and switch firmware and spec the SKU list before you order. Free.