January 19, 2012 – Earlier this week, 3M announced a strategic business alliance with FiberZone Networks to bring the latter’s Automated Fiber Management (AFM) system to the data center market. The AFM system enables remote provisioning of a data center’s fiber network, avoiding the operational costs and downtime associated with manual operation of traditional patch panels, said FiberZone Networks.

“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,” it said.

The AFM system promotes “product reliability and stable performance” through its Latched Optical Coupling (LOC) technology, which creates a 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.

“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,” added Gady Rosenfeld, VP 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.”