Ask the Expert: Customers Save Time with Optic Cable Cleaning

Welcome to this Dell EMC Community Network Ask the Expert conversation. Our discussion is now open for interaction! When formulating your question please consider the following:

• Sign in or register to engage – You must login or, if you’re new, register to DECN in order to post a question, like, bookmark or follow this discussion. https://developer-content.emc.com/login/login.asp.
• Be respectful – SMEs are volunteering to assist you and will provide you with information that they have access to.
• Provide details and background – Our SMEs will try their best to provide a full answer for your satisfaction, but will appreciate as much information you can provide about your inquiry.
• Keep focus and within topic – The expectation is to receive questions about the topic is that is being presented on the title and description of this event. We would appreciate if questions are kept within those boundaries.
• Be appreciative – Many tools available for this, likes, user ratings, follow, bookmark and the good old “thank you”.

We’re delighted to know you’ve decided to join our debate and hope you receive the answers you’re eager to find.

Thanks!

Hi experts, to kick off the discussion I would like you to address, from a customer's perspective, the importance of keeping optic cables clean. What are some of the benefits?

Well for me it is a simple hard headed business issue namely, time and money.  In my years of working with issue caused by contamination the profile is very similar.  In that all other avenues are exhausted before it is considered, because customers find it hard to believe that their critical SAN issue can be cause by a spec of dirt.  What that means is time and effort has been expended eliminating all other possibilities. From a break&fix perspective it IMHO makes perfect sense to start any investigation by removing this possibility, it is a quick and simple troubleshooting task to perform. Where you get most bang for your buck is by ensuring contamination is not present, from the get go.  That is to say when a new path or connection is deployed, by spending just a few moments to ensure the connection you are making is clean.  That small investment in time and effort gives you piece of mind and can save a whole lot of pain down the line when the connection is fully part of the production environment. Switch operating code has improved over the years but I am sure we have all experienced the mayhem a flapping ISL can cause in a large fabric, I have seen that issue caused by cable end face contamination many times. So again back to time and money, do you invest small to potentially win big.  Or do you take the risk and hope all is well while being prepared to take the pain if you are wrong.  Remember brand new cables right out of the bag are normally not guaranteed to be clean, unless you paid for them to be so.

I also feel it is a matter of choice.  In most cases, my preference is to solve something on my own.  I prefer this choice especially if I know I can save time, solve the initial problem, and move on to the next item in my list.  More importantly, our data suggests a high probability that cleaning the cable will restore connectivity.  In this case, the choice becomes intelligent for several reasons.  Resolving the error condition, and restoring connectivity sooner improves redundancy, and mitigates any potential downtime in your production environment.

From my perspective, proactive cable cleaning prior to mating is simply good datacenter practice and common sense.  It is a simple and easy insurance policy allowing for:

• reduced network downtime
• reduced troubleshooting
• optimized signal performance
• prevention of network damage

When you have the opportunity and choice, why not spend a minute to perform an easy task that can save more significant reactive time, effort and cost later?

Good point   you are correct fibre test gear can be very expensive a Fiber OTDR (Optical Time Domain Reflector) can cost thousands of $$.  Cable plant guys may use them to "certify" the patching infrastructure at install time.  We are of course not suggesting a full certification is required each time a cable is plugged into a network port.

In fact I know some OTDR tests can be corrupted and provide false positive results because the calibration cable  of the OTDR is itself contaminated.   So the contamination can be calibrated in.

You can get fibre end face inspection tools (microscope) for between $1k and $1.5K and they vary in the level of automation they provide.  But a cleaning kit with a robust cleaning cartridge  for dry cleaning and some wet cleaning supplies, as demonstrated in Bill's video, will come in around a hundred dollars.  Peanuts when you consider the costs of a single FC switch.  So I am sure a lot of shops will opt for your approach dynamox and purchase some cleaning supplies being proactive as you are is the important take away .

Exactly!  This supports the industry position.  Fiber cleaning kits are a very cost-effective means to avert problems later.

We will be posting a few examples of cleaning kits during this event.

What types/models of cleaning kits do you use?  Any particular recommendations?  If  you get a chance, please take one minute to complete the survey listed above, Connectrix - Optic Cable Cleaning as Datacenter Best Practice.

not every shop has expensive fluke scopes. Our team that is responsible for DWDM gear as well as single mode fiber connectivity on campus has those scopes. I work on the storage team and we can't really afford those scopes so we use fiber cleaning kits to clean our jumpers.

That's right.  The cleaning kits are very inexpensive and are small enough to keep right inside the cabinet with the equipment, thus being available whenever it is needed. As John mentioned we did find that the best cleaning process was a wet/dry process.  The straight dry cleaning really didn't perform well to our standards.  Adding in the initial wet cleaning process performed much better for us.

As I had mentioned in the video's cable cleaning should be a standard process in all Data Centers before plugging any fibre cable into an optic or patch panel.

John,

Can you recommend some brands that can do both wet/dry in one "device" ?

I do like the Cletop it is a quality tool.  The reason we recommend wet first is really belt and braces as you point out with inspection you can be sure to remove every spec.  When using just cleaning it is more difficult so my opting for wet then dry it just increases the odds you will get it all .  Single mode will for sure always be more impacted by dirt as you know the core os 9mirons as opposed to 125 for multimode.  The IEC standard (see above) specifies how much contamination in the concentric zones around the core is allowed. Zone A being the core has a smaller tolerance to dirt than the outer zones.

this is what we use, so dry cleaning only. Multi-mode seems to be more forgiving than single mode, so far this has been sufficient for our patch installation needs. When we connect between our MDS switches and Cisco DWDM gear, we get "scope" guys to clean those for us. I watched them clean those SM cables and they use special pads etc but it's nice to have those scopes to get every single speckle cleaned out.

Thinking about it you could use the lint free squares, but I prefer the Cletop style dry cleaner as you are guaranteed a clean surface each time.

Sorry not that I have found so far.

Just to add a little more to that too John.  We are not strictly talking about fibre cables attached to switches/directors either.  These fibre cables can by connected to patch panels, storage devices, servers, etc......  Any device that has a fibre connection point.