> That said, at a certain point, we as a firm learned that most purchasers would rather the low latency/small footprint of optical/fibre versus copper, maintenece/failure be damned.

Copper bundles get real thick, real fast: I ran an OneFS cluster for many years, and we had >50 nodes, and all the cables (each node dual-connected) ran to two central switches for backend replications. Rat's nest.

I was very happy when Isilon started officially supporting active optical cable (AOC) on the backend. Really helped with airflow and keeping things tidy.