Mike Connaughton

5 articles · 1h 10m of reading

Scaling for the Future: Liquid Cooling’s Role in AI Data Centers
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Mike Connaughton, Jacques Fluet · July 2025

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This article explores why data centers deploy direct liquid cooling (DLC) and in-rack indirect liquid cooling (IILC) systems, outlines key opportunities and barriers, and addresses infrastructure considerations for cabling and coolant routing.

10 min

Network Design for Greenfield Data Centers:

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Mike Connaughton, RCDD, CDCD · April 2022Any greenfield data center will become a brownfield when it reaches its first tech refresh. For many data centers, that refresh cycle can occur every three to five years, so planning now will ensure the most cost-effective design with the least disruption. Infrastructure manufacturers can provide assistance when creating a forward-looking network migration plan to ensure that a network design, built from the ground up today, will be ready for change in the years to come.17 min

Data Center Network Adoption, Trends, and Emerging Standards

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Mike Connaughton, RCDD, CDCD · July 2021Explore the latest designs, adoption trends, and standards for today’s and tomorrow’s high-speed, high-density applications.17 min

Data Center Optical Fiber Cabling Decisions Based on Scale

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Mike Connaughton, RCDD, CDCD, Brooke Ford, Joost Grillaert, Ph.D., Michael Wang · April 2020Decisions Based on Scale: For the purposes of comparison, there are three categories of data centers: traditional enterprise, cloud scale, and hyperscale. Learn how each of these categories has a different set of cabling and connectivity requirements when considering transmission, data rate, installation, latency, density, maintenance and migration.15 min

400 Gb Layer-1 Connectivity: Total Cost of Ownership for Singlemode Optical Fiber Based Infrastructure

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Mike Connaughton, RCDD, Rakesh Sambaraju · January 2019Many data centers are already planning for 400 Gb. Optical transceiver architecture options involve parallel optics and WDM that have opposing effects on the cost of cabling and connectivity. Learn about the costs of 100 Gb and 400 Gb links—vital information for choosing the right architecture.11 min