Structured Cabling : New Scenario, New Needs

Data center remains a core area and it has now become even more important

than ever, as enterprises cannot afford to be negligent about them. This is

especially with the huge data explosion day-by-day warranting an increased

capacity of data centers. IP convergence is an important factor that contributes

enormously to this huge data explosion which makes data center undoubtedly one

of the most critical resource requirements for any organization to be on the

competitive edge. It's essential for data center owners to have an in depth

understanding on issues involved in the data center cabling to make the right

decision.

According to the new Global Data Center Survey commissioned by CommScope,

almost a third (32%) of all organizations surveyed are planning or building new

data centers, while more than four out of five (83%) existing data centers

continue to receive investment for infrastructure and technology projects. Also,

in the backdrop of the current economic environment, almost two-thirds (65%) of

the respondents were required to demonstrate a specific return on investment (RoI)

before their data center projects were approved. It underscores the importance

data center has assumed in the present context. George Brooks, director,

enterprise data centers, CommScope says, “Whether it is to stay ahead of

technology developments and new applications, or to address cost-efficient

opportunities, data center expansions and improvement are continuing around the

world, despite the economic downturn.”

Dileep Kumar, director, product management, ADC KRONE says, “Avoiding costly

downtime, preparing for the future, and lowering total cost of ownership with

space savings, reliable performance, and effective manageability warrant

attention to increase data center capability for overall successful business in

organizations.”

If organizations want to lower their total cost of ownership, support future

growth, reduce the risk of downtime, maximize performance, and improve

reconfiguration abilities, they have to invest in data centers even in

recessionary times. Investments in strategically designed data centers are

preferable to avoid losses that could occur in a matter of minutes for

businesses like banks, airlines, shipping facilities, and online brokerages due

to network downtime.

Data Centers Transformed



Data center segment has been significantly driving the structured cabling

market in India at par with the developed countries across the western

hemisphere. Data centers underwent a network convergence in the early and mid

90s as Ethernet became the de-facto standard. But as new applications created a

need for high-speed and low-latency network fabrics, the data center networks

became more fragmented.

The old days' data centers were just considered as a cable termination

location. But there has been a great transformation since then. DS Nagendra,

general manager, LAN, Nexans says, “The technology of today's data centers has

leapfrogged, and we have seen it to be an integration point of various

activities of the enterprises. The data centers are today integrated with

business intelligence, ERP, financial services, apart from the regular

activities of the enterprise.” Data centers houses the SAN, NAS, and web hosting

servers, and they are integrated with the precision HVAC to provide accurate

usage of appliances/facilities of the enterprise.

Data centers are also installed with surveillance cameras, fire alarm

systems, humidity/temperature controlled systems to ensure 100% uptime. With

these new gadgets installed, power consumption and heat generated from these

equipments have increased, and today enterprises are looking at the concept of

green data centers.

When it comes to data centers, structured cabling is the first building block

globally. Sandip Chadha MD, India and SAARC, CommScope says, “Over 54% of the

organizations would invest in Cat 6A 10Gb/s solutions as their high-performance

and reliability are key for virtualization and consolidation which are the main

drivers of green and cost-reduction strategies and are highly dependent on

reliability.” Airports and healthcare organizations are the business sectors

leading the drive toward investment in Cat 6A 10G copper solutions.

Sathya Narayanan MS, country manager, India, Hubbell Wiring Systems says,

“Initially it all started with Cat 5E and Cat 6 and now managers are looking at

Cat 6A or fiber solutions to deliver best serving data centers, as enterprises

need to look for capacity, performance, and cost-effectiveness.”

As Satish Rao, national business development manager, VDI, Schneider Electric

India says, “Organizations today are more knowledgeable on what goes into making

a data center. Transition has taken place from being a copper installation with

fiber backbone to a healthy mix of fiber (both OS1 and OM2/OM3) along with 10G

copper.”

Organizations have become increasingly aware of the ill-effects of excessive

energy consumption and resource wastage. To avoid this, they are looking at

technologies which promise to optimize resource utilization while reducing costs

and energy consumption. With virtualization, they have managed to reduce the

number of resources required at the server and client end. Rajesh Kumar, country

manager, The Siemon Company, says, “The obvious next step is to make networks

efficient. This has been achieved to some extent with intelligent switches,

routers, and gateways. Deploying faster but energy-efficient cabling systems is

the solution.” He further adds, “While the current cabling market is shifting

toward 10G 6A with copper on both UTP and STP versions, the 10G 6A cabling

market, driven by fiber channel adoption, is moving toward single mode fiber

with 'Zero Water Peak' to support 10G and WDM.” According to the structured

cabling industry experts, with data centers and high bandwidth applications on

the rise, there will be a need for high performance cables for structured

cabling to manage the cable clutter. Copper will continue to find acceptance

with Cat 6 and Cat 6A or 10G 6A in the data center environment.

Data center cabling needs a different approach compared to LAN cabling, since

the bandwidth requirements and reliability levels are different from a normal

LAN. Also, the network density in data center needs to be managed.

10 Gig Ethernet over UTP is a significant advancement while intelligent

cabling is providing IT managers with the required abilities for rapid fault

detection in data center networks. High-density fiber distribution systems,

vertical and horizontal cable managers, fiber raceway systems, etc, are other

major products deployed in data centers to achieve higher densities.

DC Design Today



Organizations should first recognize that the phase of designing and

implementing a data center is very crucial for successfully running their

business critical applications. It is an exciting task, but at the same time it

is a challenging task also, as businesses are always at stake when the data

centers are not properly designed, and implemented, keeping in mind the current

requirements.

Designing and implementing an infrastructure that maximizes data center

management is vital to maintaining availability, operational efficiency, and

aesthetics while also supporting growth, advances in technology, regulatory

changes, and the increasing need for security. Poor infrastructure design

decisions can affect long-term reliability and total cost of ownership. Making

some simple choices when designing the infrastructure can result in dramatic

improvements in resolving key data center issues related to airflow and

response-time.

Data center cabling are uniquely different from LAN cabling. Data center

supports different equipments, applications, and bandwidth speeds. They require

specialized design, greater reliability, manageability, and higher density.

Dileep Kumar, ADC Krone says, “The infrastructure must consistently support the

flow of data without errors that cause retransmission and delays. Cabling and

connectivity backed by a reputed vendor with guaranteed error-free performance

help avoid poor transmission within the data center. A sub-standard performing

data canter can be just as costly and disruptive to your business as downtime.”

Apart from this, organizations also need to ensure whether the particular

cabling system they consider will support migration to higher data rates in the

future. Subhashini Prabhakar, chief technology manager, Dax Networks says,

“While it comes to cabling a data center, there are a few things which every

organization should strive to meet. Data center cabling systems must provide

fast data rates and reliably handle the streaming of data while enabling

migration to higher data rates when necessary.”

Modular Planning



Modular planning is most advocated by the data center experts. The main

advantages of pre-terminated or modular solutions in data center include up to

75% reduction in installation time, increased quality, and consistency, reduced

failure rate due to simplicity, and reliable quality owing to factory

termination and testing. Modular designing of data center is more acceptable by

the industry, because it is far easier to set up compared to traditional data

center, and are easy-to-manage.

One of the important advantages is that it helps in easy management. Rajesh

Kumar of The Siemon Company says, “While planning for a cabling infrastructure,

the IT manager should opt for a solution which is easy-to-run and manage.

Therefore, it is advisable to go for modular cabling systems.”

Rao subscribes to this. He says, “Today the data center design should be

flexible and modular in nature and many vendors do realize this and design

accordingly. They can expand their current capacity easily as required by their

customers. Data center managers are fully aware that cutting much at the corners

can also impact their service deliverables.” He advises that modular planning

for any data center should incorporate provisions for all three media-10G on

copper, and fiber OS1, and OM2/OM3 along with the associated pathways and

optimum usage of space.

To keep up with the increasing business and technology demands, organizations

are looking at adding more data center capacity. Agility and ability to

introduce new technologies quickly are important factors that organizations have

to consider while planning for IT infrastructure development. Unless new data

centers are designed in a modular way, enabling speedy expansion, organizations

will not be able to change fast enough to meet user requirements. As the

physical condition of a data center directly influences the performance of the

IT infrastructure, it is imperative to establish facilities that run

efficiently, and can accommodate additional computing equipments, and are easily

refreshed with new technology and operate reliably.

“Modular Cat 6A solutions have brought down the cost of ownership for the

customer and have enabled faster installation time. Also they avoid field level

issues like quality of termination and wrong installations,” says, Narayanan.

According to Rajesh Kumar of The Siemon Company “All modular design should

follow all applicable code/standards and local building regulations and a

user-friendly assistant design tool/configuration formula.”

Achieve Density



The uptake of blade server technology has created a cable congestion problem

in the backbone especially with the increasing amount of servers being deployed.

This congestion problem has become difficult to manage. Moving to a higher

density than twenty-four cables in 1HU patch panels has proved to be difficult

for technicians to work, without disrupting live services when adding or

removing patch cords. In order to retain twenty-four cables in 1HU, and at the

same time improve density, vendors like Nexans have developed a new patch panel

which removes the need for cable management panels, and effectively doubles the

density in the backbone.

Right choice of cabling solution is a must to alleviate this problem. Dileep

Kumar says, “Higher densities within the data center can be achieved with the

right product selection such as reduced size cables, vertical and horizontal

cable managers, fiber raceway systems, high-density fiber distribution frames,

etc. Reliability can be increased by having better redundancy, right product

selection, and best installation practices.” Mylaraiah JN, country technical

manager, AMP Netconnect, Tyco Electronics says, “Data centers being the first

place for high-speed applications; density of cabling has influence on required

space and on airflow efficiency which needs to be taken care of.”

High-density active devices with more ports naturally dissipate more heat and

have more cables to be managed. Further, many switches have front/back airflow

concept and disturbance in cables impact airflow, therefore cooling assumes

critical importance. Top vendors like Tyco Electronics have designed a range of

new generation products for routing, organizing, maintaining, and managing

network cabling. These are suitable for high-performance twisted pair and

optical fiber distribution cable and patch cords, and can be used in cabinets.

These are specifically designed for data center environments and locations where

high-density and high-performance are required.

Beauty Matters



A data center must showcase a company's commitment to technology. When

designing the infrastructure, innovative cabling management solutions can

improve the overall look and aesthetics of a data center, both at deployment and

following future moves, additions, and changes. Aesthetics is also a benefit in

terms of design that minimizes cable congestion.

There are serious concerns that end users witness when they plan for data

center cabling. The issues are related to reliability, manageability, cooling,

power requirements, time and space pressures, bandwidth, poor design, and lack

of experience of the installers.

Reliability: Uninterrupted service and continuous access are critical to the

daily operation and productivity of organizations' business. With downtime

translating directly to loss of income, data centers must be designed for

redundant, fail-safe reliability, and availability.

Manageability: It is the key for optimizing data centers. The infrastructure

should be designed as a highly reliable and flexible utility to accommodate

disaster recovery, upgrades, and modifications. According to the recent

CommScope survey, 54% of the respondents named ease-of-maintenance and 62% of

the respondents named performance as influencing factors on their purchasing

decisions. They also said that prices do not dominate the purchasing decision.

Power Requirements: Electricity is crucial for a data center. A power

interruption for even a fraction of a second is enough to cause a server

failure. The measures enterprises employ to prevent disruptions should be based

on the level of reliability required. Common practices include two or more power

feeds from the utility company; uninterrupted power supplies, multiple circuits

to systems, and equipment, and onsite generators.

It has been reported that power consumption within the data center has almost

doubled over the past five to ten years due to the increased year-on-year demand

for electronic storage, LAN switches, and the introduction of blade servers.

Management of power is now a pre-requisite down to the cabinet level.

Cooling: Servers and equipments are getting smaller and more powerful to

accommodate the need for high-density data center installations. However, this

generates an enormous amount of heat in a smaller area. Therefore, adequate

cooling equipment and the use of hot aisle/cold aisle configuration are

required.

Chadha says, “About 80% of the organizations cited reduction of data center

power and cooling costs as an area of concern. 48% of the enterprises want to

reduce power consumption by 20% or more.” 64% want to implement energy

consumption reduction strategy within twenty-four months. In addition to server

consolidation and virtualization, blade servers, storage virtualization, energy

efficient storage, and energy efficient UPS are also used for energy savings.

When blade servers were first introduced, cooling systems did not have the

capacity to match the heat dissipated from the servers. A typical cooling level

of 1.4 Kw was provided to each cabinet and it was not uncommon for servers to

dissipate up to 10 Kw of heat. In recent times, however, significant

improvements have been made to the processors inside the server, which are the

main sources of heat. For example, Intel has been shipping their 90nm silicon

dual core Xeon processors which have greatly reduced heat output. They have

plans to launch 45nm InSb processor which will reduce heat output by a factor of

ten and increase processor power by 50%. These new developments mean that users

can now plan for these in cabinets with standard cooling levels of 1.4 Kw.

Bandwidth



Cabling itself should support current bandwidth needs while enabling

anticipated migration to higher network speeds without sacrificing performance.

In fact, the data center infrastructure should be designed and implemented to

outlast the applications and equipment it supports by at least fifteen years.

Although the Fiber Channel versus Ethernet debate in the SAN is still ongoing,

the former still appears to be the preferred choice and will probably continue

to do so in the foreseeable future. The arrival of FC over IP seems to have

strengthened its position enabling fast back-up and recovery to a remote site.

Enterprises need to recognize the value of the data center infrastructure and

its components in order to ensure their employees and customers have

uninterrupted access to the servers, storage systems, and networking devices to

carry out successfully their daily business transactions and to remain

productive in a competitive environment.

Kannan K



kannan@cybermedia.co.in