Seasoned industry professionals may recall the excruciating, painstaking days of installing and connecting countless fibers, one at a time. As the number of data centers grew exponentially in the 2000s, designers and installers were tasked with managing hundreds and even thousands of single- and 2-fiber connector solutions. To accommodate the high volume of connectors within ever-tighter space constraints, installers and designers were forced to create more elaborate storage and routing solutions that came with their own set of challenges. Fortunately, those days are long gone – thanks in large part to the emergence of the multi-fiber push-on (MPO) connector. The MPO format dramatically reduced the amount of time, effort, and space required to install and deploy network technologies, particularly in parallel optic applications.