cabling
BIG FUTURE, BIG DEMANDS
Valerie Maguire of Siemon discusses current and future application standards,
media types and deployment strategies for data centre cabling to meet the
demands of Big Data and the Internet of Things.
E
veryone is talking about
how the Internet of
Things (IoT) and Big
Data are driving the
need for more bandwidth
and increased transmission speeds
in cloud, colocation and enterprise
data centres to handle larger sets of
complex data from multiple sources.
Much of this growth in data is being
driven by advancements in sensor
technology and a growing number of
IP enabled devices, as well as an ever
increasing number of mobile devices.
Today’s leading organisations
are looking to effectively utilise all
of this data to improve customer
satisfaction, increase revenue, cut
Figure 1
16
operational expenditures and improve
productivity. For organisations to gain
the most from the IoT and Big Data,
data centre cabling infrastructures
must allow for quick and efficient
transmission of data for processing,
analysing and storage.
Whether the data centre is
outsourced in a cloud or colocation
centre, customer owned and
operated, or a hybrid of both,
effectively moving today’s larger sets
of complex data requires reliable, low
latency, high bandwidth connections
between a variety of active equipment
at the edge and within switch-toswitch backbone links to the core and
storage area network (SAN). At the
same time, the data centre cabling
infrastructure must ensure maximum
management and scalability to
accommodate the continued growth
in data and bandwidth demand.
Thankfully, developments in
industry standards, advancements
in cable technology and improved
infrastructure design are making this
possible. Data centre owners and
operators will be well benefited by
understanding current and future
application standards, media types
and deployment strategies for their
data centre cabling.
Cabling the edge
In the equipment distribution area
of the data centre, where access
switches transmit data to and
from active equipment at the edge
(eg. application servers, storage
area devices and other processing
equipment), transmission speeds have
increased from 1 to 10 gigabit per
second (Gb/s). The IEEE 10GBase-T
Ethernet application supports 10Gb/s
over standards based Category 6A or