This tech brief will highlight how to breakout signals from 40G to 400G optical transceivers or optics.

A breakout link is also known as an aggregation link. The two terms describe which way the optical signal is traveling in the channel.

When connecting switch-to-switch, Ethernet spine-to-leaf switches or Fibre Channel director to edge switches, the connection is most often a direct connect. For instance, one Ethernet 100GBASE-SR4 optic to another 100GBASE-SR4 optic or one Fibre Channel 128GFC optic to another 128GFC optic. When cabling 400 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) or 256 Gigabit Fibre Channel (GFC) optics, the same basic components are used except singlemode fiber would most often be used instead of multimode fiber.

When connecting the leaf or edge switch to a server, the individual parallel optic port is broken out into four duplex optics or ports that operate at lower speeds: for example, (1) 100GE port into (4) 25GE ports.