Panduit FHC9N-24-LAAS HD Flex 24-Fiber Cassette

The Panduit FHC9N-24-LAAS is an HD Flex fiber cassette delivering 24 single-mode OS2 fibers in a compact, rack-mountable form factor. Designed for datacenter and enterprise backbone deployments, it provides 2× MPO-12 male trunk connectors on the rear and 12 duplex LC/APC connectors on the front panel. Method A modified polarity aligns with TIA/EIA-568 structured cabling standards, simplifying migration from 10G to 40G/100G Ethernet. The cassette fits Panduit's FHD high-density enclosures and supports standard insertion loss specifications for reach up to 10 km over OS2 fiber. Black polycarbonate housing and laser-etched port labeling ensure field serviceability in high-density patching environments.

Key Features

• 24 single-mode OS2 fibers (9µm core) for long-reach datacenter and campus backbones
• 2× MPO-12 male connectors (rear) to 12× duplex LC/APC connectors (front) in a single cassette
• Method A modified polarity for compatibility with TIA-568 structured cabling deployments
• APC (angled physical contact) polish on all LC connectors for <-60dB return loss
• HD Flex form factor fits Panduit FHD high-density fiber enclosures (1U/2U/4U)
• Standard insertion loss specification for 40GBASE-SR4, 100GBASE-SR10, and 10G LR/ER optics
• Polycarbonate housing with laser-etched port numbering and color-coded strain relief
• Pull-tab design for quick cassette insertion and removal during moves/adds/changes
• Pre-terminated factory assembly eliminates field splicing and reduces deployment time
• Ships in cartons of 10 for large-scale datacenter buildouts

The FHC9N-24-LAAS uses OS2 single-mode fiber with a 9-micron core diameter, rated for wavelengths from 1310nm to 1550nm and compliant with ITU-T G.652.D specifications. Each of the 24 fibers is factory-terminated and tested to deliver insertion loss within the standard range (typically <0.5dB per mated pair), ensuring compatibility with 40GBASE-SR4 parallel optics (4 lanes × 10 Gbps) and 100GBASE-SR10 deployments (10 lanes × 10 Gbps). The rear MPO-12 connectors use male push-type interfaces with key-up orientation, designed to mate with MPO trunk cables running between rack rows or between buildings. On the front, the 12 duplex LC/APC connectors provide individual breakout access for patching to switches, storage arrays, or cross-connects. The APC polish on all LC connectors delivers return loss better than -60dB, critical for preventing back-reflection in high-bitrate coherent optics and reducing bit-error rates in 10G LR/ER and 40G/100G links.

Method A modified polarity follows the TIA-568 standard's flip-flop rule: Connector 1 on one end becomes Connector 12 on the opposite end, ensuring transmit-to-receive alignment without requiring crossover patch cords. This cassette is pre-wired with the internal fiber mapping locked at the factory, so you avoid field polarity errors that cause link-down incidents during cutovers. In a typical spine-leaf datacenter topology, you'd install FHC9N-24-LAAS cassettes in both the spine switch rack and the leaf switch rack, connect them via 2× MPO-12 trunk cables (one 12-fiber trunk per MPO connector), then patch individual 10G or 40G optics to the front LC ports. The cassette's compact footprint supports up to 144 fibers in a 1U FHD enclosure (6 cassettes × 24 fibers), giving you the density to build out 3,600-fiber cross-connects in a single 42U rack.

Panduit's HD Flex cassette family is purpose-built for high-velocity datacenter migrations where you're overlaying 40G/100G backbone capacity onto an existing 10G structured cabling plant. Rather than ripping out LC infrastructure and re-terminating everything with MPO, you preserve the LC patch panels at the edge and use MPO trunks only in the backbone—where they deliver 12× or 24× the port density of individual LC duplex runs. The FHC9N-24-LAAS sits in an FHD enclosure mounted in the rack, accepting MPO trunk input from ceiling pathways or underfloor conduit and breaking it out to 12 duplex LC ports that your team can patch with standard LC-LC jumpers. This hybrid approach keeps your existing LC inventory in play, reduces the learning curve for field techs unfamiliar with MPO polarity rules, and isolates the high-fiber-count MPO trunk runs to a controlled backbone pathway where you're not doing daily moves/adds/changes.

In a campus environment, you'd use OS2 single-mode fiber to span building-to-building links up to 10 km (at 10GBASE-LR wavelengths) or 40 km (at 10GBASE-ER wavelengths). Install the FHC9N-24-LAAS in the main distribution frame (MDF) and the intermediate distribution frame (IDF), run a pair of 12-fiber MPO trunk cables through the campus conduit, and terminate each building's horizontal cabling on the front LC ports. The cassette's modular design means you can start with a single 24-fiber trunk (supporting 12 duplex circuits) and scale to 144 fibers in the same 1U enclosure as bandwidth demand grows. The polycarbonate housing withstands the mechanical stress of repeated patch cord insertion—critical in environments where you're re-patching VLANs, adding storage replication links, or swapping failed optics every few weeks. Laser-etched port numbering on the cassette faceplate and color-coded strain relief boots (blue for single-mode, per TIA-598-C) give your team visual confirmation of polarity and fiber type during late-night maintenance windows.

The FHC9N-24-LAAS ships as a pre-terminated, factory-tested assembly with both MPO-12 and LC/APC connectors installed, eliminating the need for field splicing, cleaving, or polishing. This reduces your per-port installation time from 20 minutes (hand-terminated LC) to under 2 minutes (plug-in cassette), while delivering lower insertion loss and higher return loss than field-terminated alternatives. It's UL and cUL listed for use in plenum-rated pathways when installed in compatible Panduit enclosures, and the polycarbonate material is UL 94V-0 flame-rated for compliance with NEC Article 770. When you're engineering a spine-leaf fabric that needs to scale from 10G edge to 40G uplinks without a forklift upgrade of your entire horizontal cabling plant, the FHC9N-24-LAAS gives you the port density, polarity precision, and field serviceability to execute the migration in a single maintenance window—and the OS2 fiber performance to support 100G coherent optics when you're ready to scale again.