ANSI/TIA-942-B: Telecommunications Infrastructure Standard for Data Centers

This Standard specifies requirements for data center and telecommunication infrastructure including single tenant enterprise data centers and multi-tenant Internet hosting data centers. Specifications are provided for very small data centers to data centers that occupy multiple building floors or rooms.

ANSI/TIA-942-B “Telecommunications Infrastructure Standard for Data Centers” was revised by the TIA TR-42.1 Commercial Building Cabling Subcommittee and published in July, 2017. TIA-942-B incorporates the contents of the previous edition TIA-942-A.

• The TIA-942-B standard includes the following, among other, changes from the “A” revision:
• Incorporates TIA-942-A Addendum 1, which addresses data center fabrics
• Adds 16- and 32-fiber MPO-style array connectors as an additional connector type for termination of more than two fibers. The 16- and 32-fiber connectors were standardized when ANSI/TIA-604-18 was published.
• Adds Category 8 as an allowed type of balanced twisted-pair cable, and changes the recommendation for Category 6A balanced twisted-pair cable to Category 6A or higher.
• Adds OM5 (wideband multimode fiber) as an allowed fiber type. The TIA-492.AAAE standard specifies OM5 fiber, which is designed to support short-wave wavelength division multiplexing.