Clearfield recently announced the NOVA Velocity Panel for high-density fiber management. “The panel is designed to help data center operators and installers significantly accelerate fiber deployment in cable prep and splicing operations in space-constrained AI data center environments, while maintaining the low-loss performance required for next-generation networks,” the company said when making the announcement.

It added that it developed the panel “after a major hyperscale customer and data center installer approached [our] fiber management experts with a real-world challenge. Both were encountering the same problem: traditional approaches required technicians to distribute large fiber counts across multiple panels and spend hours preparing, routing, managing, and splicing fiber at each rack. With hyperscale data centers, that challenge multiplies quickly. Preparing, routing, managing, and splicing large fiber counts can require up to 4 hours per panel, translating to thousands of technician hours across a large-scale data center deployment. The NOVA Velocity Panel streamlines that workflow, allowing technicians to move quickly and significantly increase deployment productivity.”

The 2RU NOVA Velocity Panel provides a high-density splicing environment, capable of supporting as many as 2304 fibers. This density allows installers to transition and manage large volumes of fiber at the top of the rack without disturbing fibers across multiple panels, which helps preserve rack space for compute infrastructure.

Fabio Baldo, director of market development for Clearfield, stated, “AI infrastructure is changing both the scale and speed at which fiber needs to be deployed inside the data center. The NOVA Velocity Panel applies Clearfield’s decades of fiber-management expertise to the demands of high-density AI infrastructure, giving customers a way to deploy extremely high fiber counts in very limited space while maintaining the performance these networks demand.”

Southern FiberLink Solutions, a fiber-optic installation, splicing, and testing specialist, was an early user of the NOVA Velocity Panel. The company’s experience supporting hyperscale data centers helped informed the patent-pending product. The company’s chief executive officer and co-founder Robert Queen commented, “When you multiply several hours of fiber preparation, routing, and splicing across thousands of racks, installation time becomes a major constraint on how quickly these facilities can come online. The NOVA Velocity Panel addresses a problem installers deal with every day and gives us a much faster, more-efficient way to manage extremely high fiber counts in these environments.”

The panel’s modular architecture is a significant contributor to its efficiency. It gives users the flexibility to deploy Velocity as part of a complete system or to incorporate individual panels incrementally as infrastructure requirements evolve. It is part of Clearfield’s NOVA platform, a portfolio of products that is designed to help installers organize, route, and access high fiber counts efficiently while protecting fiber and simplifying installation and maintenance.