A global cruise line company must refresh its current fleet. It will refresh the ship’s “insides” to be cost-effective and improve sustainability, replacing all WLAN/LAN hardware. During this refresh, the company will not change its existing security requirements. The CIO also wants to minimize unused switch ports. Any future expansion will require a hardware refresh. They will begin with the smallest ship, with a maximum of 800 guests.

Each ship has a LAN infrastructure comprising two core switches, up to 10 redundant distribution switches, and up to 500 access switches (400 cabins and 100 technical rooms). The core switches are in the ship’s MDF, and the distribution switches are in the IDFs. Each cabin and technical room receives one individual access switch.

The ship’s cabling infrastructure will not be refreshed. Every IDF is connected to the MDF by SMF, with two pairs available for the interconnect between core and distribution. The SM fiber between the MDF and IDF is less than 300 meters (980 ft) long and is OS1. Each cabin is connected to the IDF by one OM2 pair, with a maximum length of 60 meters (200 ft). Each technical room is connected to the IDF by one OM2 pair, with lengths from 100 to 150 meters (320 to 500 ft).

For every cabin/technical room, the customer wants to replace the existing fan-less 2530/2540 switches without changing the requirements, except that the uplink to the distribution switch must be upgraded to 10GbE to accommodate increased network traffic, and the technical rooms require redundant power.

The WLAN infrastructure will be refreshed 1:1, with no new cabling or AP locations. The WLAN infrastructure uses 200/300 series indoor and outdoor APs running InstantOS (fewer than 300 APs), and the customer has no WLAN requirement changes.

The cruise line company will replace its existing Internet connection before the LAN/WLAN refresh. The new Internet connection will provide 99.8% uptime, required to keep paid guest Wi-Fi operational. With this new Internet connection, the CIO wants to base the design on Aruba’s ESP architecture because the Internet connection is guaranteed.

Based on best practices, what optic type should be recommended for the connection between the IDF and the technical rooms?