I have come across an interesting excerpt from an article discussing the pros and cons of copper cabling within data centres. I am not sure whether this has been addresses on this forum (it probably has and I have not read it), but the question of reliability is cearly an important one, and one that copper clearly has demonstrated. The bolding of the third paragraph is mine, and seems to point to copper having a competitive advantage over VCSELs and photonics. What am I missing here?

Thanks!!

One of the biggest advantages to copper cables is their reliability, which is measured in mean time between failures (MTBF). The MTBF for passive copper cables is around 50 million hours -- typically order of magnitude higher than industry data of fiber cables. Copper cables provide a serious benefit to the enterprise data center where reliable data transport is paramount to avoid downtime.

With the continued growth of data, and the usage of data for various applications, including drug discovery, traffic management, car and airplane design, social media, financial trading, and national security, the need for moving data faster within the data center has increased dramatically. High-performance computing, Web 2.0, cloud, and storage infrastructures use interconnect speeds of 10, 40, and 56 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) and have now started to migrate toward 100 Gbps.

Vendors have already demonstrated copper cables ranging from four to eight meters that can provide bandwidth at up to 100 Gbps bandwidth, opening data center doors to previously unheard-of interconnect performance and efficiency. The ability to continue to use copper cables for such speeds instead of using all fiber (VCSEL- or silicon photonics-based) provides a competitive advantage.