What are the Differences between DAC vs AOC cables?

Direct Attach Cable, referred to as DAC. With hot-swappable transceiver modules like SFP+, QSFP, and QSFP28.

It provides a lower-cost, high-density interconnects solution alternative for high-speed interconnects from 10G to 100G to fiber optics transceivers.

Compared with optics transceivers, the direct attach cables provide a cost-effective solution that supports multiple protocols including 40GbE,100GbE, Gigabit & 10G Ethernet, 8G FC, FCoE, and Infiniband.

Active Optical Cable, referred to as AOC.

AOC is two transceivers attached together by a fiber cable, creating a one-part assembly. Like DAC, Active Optical Cable cannot be separated.

However, AOC does not use copper cables but fiber cables allowing them to reach longer distances.

Active Optical Cables can reach distances from 3 meters up to 100 meters, but they are commonly used for a distance of up to 30 meters.

The AOC technology has been developed for several data rates, such as 10G SFP+, 25G SFP28, 40G QSFP+, and 100G QSFP28.

AOC also exists as breakout cables, where one side of the assembly is divided into four cables, each terminated by a transceiver of a smaller data rate, allowing to connection a larger number of ports and devices.

In today’s Data Centers, more bandwidth is needed to support the use of server virtualization where multiple virtual machines are combined on a single physical host server. To accommodate the ever-growing number of operating systems and applications residing on individual servers, virtualization requires significantly increased data transmission between the servers and switches. At the same time, the amount and type of devices residing on the network have dramatically increased the amount of data that needs to be transmitted to and from storage area networks (SANs) and Network Attached Storage (NAS). The application is mainly for high-speed I/O applications in storage, networking, and telecom markets, Switches, servers, routers, network interface cards (NICs), Host Bus Adapters (HBAs), and High Density and High Data Throughput.

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