EDITOR’S QUESTION
from the highly over-subscribed,
hierarchical and costly legacy solutions
of the past.
Increased adoption of high-
performance servers and
applications requiring
higher bandwidth is
driving adoption of
10 and 25 Gigabit
Ethernet switching
in combination
with 40 and 100
Gigabit Ethernet.
As a result, it has become
increasingly necessary
to include network fabrics,
software-defined networking,
hyperconvergence and software
defined storage technologies in the
data centre.
NABIL KHALIL,
EXECUTIVE VICE
PRESIDENT,
MIDDLE EAST,
TURKEY AND
AFRICA AT R&M
he world is moving
to the cloud model to
achieve better agility and
economy, following the
lead of the cloud titans
who have redefined the
economics of application delivery during
the last decade. Applications such as social
media and Big Data, new architectures
such as dense server virtualisation and
IP storage, and the imperative of mobile
access to all applications have placed
enormous demands on the network
infrastructure in data centres.
T
Network architectures that make the
cloud possible are fundamentally different
www.intelligentdatacentres.com
From a cabling standpoint, all this adds
complexity and modernisation of the data
centre promotes the need for simplicity,
reliability and high-density. There are
several areas to focus on to address these
cabling needs.
Fibre Vs. copper
Today, no one asks for a slower network
and while it is 10GbE that is being
deployed, all new implementations are
factoring in the need to include easy 40G
and even 100G migration as a part of their
future. And for this, higher value cabling
systems such as fibre is the way forward.
Fibre systems facilitate the setup of high-
density cabling systems for data networks
with parallel-optical connection technology.
Consequently, data centres can introduce
10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) or even 40 and
100 GbE as a bandwidth to connect the
fastest servers and switches to each other.
That being said, copper is still a good
option for horizontal links (10G) and with
the new Cat. 8, it will be able to provide
40G for 30 metres. So, it remains cheaper
and sufficient for small distances.
Density and modularity
there is a real risk of networks becoming
bandwidth bottlenecks. By moving from
traditional low-density cabling to high-
density structured cable solutions, data
centres can implement physical network
infrastructure in a far more manageable
and flexible manner. These systems enable
data centres to easily migrate to 25, 40
and 100 Gb/s networks and solve some of
the most critical network challenges.
Automation
Automation benefits servers, storage
and switches, but the cabling that
interconnects it all largely remains
a cumbersome, manual, error-prone
management mess.
For this reason, over the last several years,
automated infrastructure management
(AIM) has become a strategic investment
for optimising resource usage and cabling
documentation in data centres.
AIM eliminates stranded capacity,
facilitates end-to-end analysis and
agile infrastructure management and
aids predictive analysis and dynamic
infrastructure. Not only this, these solutions
vastly improve the efficiency of operation
and administration and can result in
reduction of downtime by 30 to 50%.
As the topic of data centre modernisation
is expansive, R&M has provided its
unmatched expertise on data centre
planning, design and implementation to
organisations in our comprehensive Data
Centre Handbook, the latest edition of
which is available for free download from
our website: https://www.rdm.com/sites/
DC-Handbook.
HIGHER VALUE
CABLING
SYSTEMS SUCH
AS FIBRE IS THE
WAY FORWARD.
With internal data centre traffic expected
to grow by 80% over the next three years,
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