3M has announced a strategic business alliance with FiberZone Networks to bring its automated fiber management (AFM) system to the data center market.

From always-on movies to data storage in the cloud to corporate and consumer digital archives, managing the data infrastructure has become a critical discipline for today’s enterprises. A single outage can affect thousands of customers and significantly impact the revenue of network and cloud providers.

The AFM system from FiberZone Networks enables remote provisioning of a data center’s fiber network, avoiding the operational costs and downtime associated with manual operation of traditional patch panels. This allows data center operators to dynamically manage fiber connectivity based on load requirements and customer needs, enabling on-demand services and new service offerings—such as managed cage and expedited cross-connect services—along with the reliability, flexibility, fault tolerance and management for the fiber infrastructure that manual patching cannot offer.

Key to the AFM product reliability and stable performance is the patented Latched Optical Coupling (LOC) technology. This technology creates a secure, physical optical fiber connection within the system which can be changed to a different port configuration on-demand through a software interface or programmed automatically. The fibers can be re-arranged in a NxN, non-blocking manner.

Multi-tenant data center operators, and tenants in these facilities, can optimize their operational expenditures and revenue using AFM from FiberZone Networks to minimize downtime and increase service offerings.

3M has entered into a strategic business alliance with FiberZone Networks to offer the AFM with Latched Optical Coupling to the data center market as an authorized sales representative.

“The FiberZone Networks AFM system uniquely addresses an emerging issue in data center infrastructure management and is a perfect complement to our own growing portfolio of solutions for data centers,” said Gordon Wiegand, 3M Communication Markets Division business development manager. “3M’s global reach, combined with FiberZone Networks’ industry-first fiber management system will help data center operators worldwide facilitate the transition to cloud data management while delivering operational efficiencies.”

“3M is one of the world’s most reputable companies and we’re proud to sell our solution alongside their market-leading products to the data center market,” said Gady Rosenfeld, vice president of Business Development and Marketing at FiberZone Networks. “3M’s scale and global reach will allow us to offer our AFM system to more customers and in new markets around the world.”

3M already offers a broad and rapidly growing portfolio of solutions for data centers, including high-speed copper, fiber and active optical cabling solutions which utilize leading-edge technologies to provide flexibility, high-performance and value. Additional products from 3M for data centers include next generation, sustainable fire protection fluid; static control products and services; medium voltage cable assemblies used for data center construction and biometric security systems.