INTELLIGENT CABLING
Future
standards
are always
developed while
taking into
consideration
existing
standards and
are, in fact,
developed as
an upgrade
to existing
standards limits.
and grow hand-in-hand. Convergence of
networking technologies, new expectations
including availability, reliability, scale-out,
always-on, are driving datacentres to be
redesigned and rearchitected. Monolithic
industries such as broadcast media and
publishing are being digitised, driving the
need for modern datacentres within those
organisations, to cope with their future
consumption models in social media,
search engines, and mobile devices.
Increasing attention to the business
gains from big data and real-time analytics
is vastly changing the relationship between
how in-memory compute, flash storage,
and networking is architected in the
datacentre. Growing urbanisation and
sensitivity to sustainability are driving
concerns about how environmental
friendly is the overall datacentre and
networking infrastructure.
The arrival of next generation wireless,
new high-speed protocols and high level
of Power over Ethernet allowing for true
IP convergence, is putting huge pressure
on the traditional local area network to
cope and deliver with higher performance
and compute-intensive workloads, in
an efficient and predictable way. Many
of the existing building networking
infrastructures are no longer future ready,
and will not be flexible to accommodate
devices, workloads, and applications, to
meet user expectations of tomorrow’s
digital workforce.
Bringing in parallel building networks
may be a temporary fix, but will not be
a solution to meet future requirements.
Adding in networking to meet present
requirements will not be future proof.
While it is possible to make some
educated guesses on what the next decade
holds in store, no one knows exactly what
is coming. And it is even more difficult
to exactly predict what the demands and
workloads on the network will look like.
We are being challenged by the changing
application environments and increasing
user requirements.
Future standards are always developed
while taking into consideration existing
standards and are, in fact, developed as an
upgrade to existing standards limits. The
latest standards development needs to be
considered in the planning and design of
the project to ensure that the final project
implementation will not only support the
current applications requirements but
also be able to accommodate the latest
emerging technologies.
If organisations neglect the latest
standards today, they may be investing
in an outdated technology, which will be
become even more outdated once new
applications evolve. So, staying up to date
at the project planning stage is a must to
ensure that their investment will last for
a very long period and be able to support
future technologies.
Structured cabling standards are
developed and published by reputable
organisations that are taking active part
in developing new technologies to serve
the IT industry, and it is the priority of all
standard organisations to set standards
limits to ensure the reliability of the final
product.
It is enough for the project owner to
ensure that the project specifications are
meeting the latest standards updates
and that the structured cabling vendor
has trusted quality standards to ensure
the reliability of the final project
implementation.
Cabling installations, by their nature,
are intended to last multiple generations
of equipment and technology life cycles.
They last from 20 to 25 years. Comparing
this to other systems, and looking at active
switches for example, the active switches
life time is a maximum of 5 years, which
means that the structured cabling can
support 4 or 5 generations of upgrade in
the active switches technologies.
This cycle, however, is lower in
datacentre environments, where updates
of technologies are happening much
faster than the building environments,
making the structured cabling good for
two or three generations of upgrade in
active switching technologies with an
average of 10 years life time. Therefore,
whatever decisions we take now on cabling
standards are important enough to be in
place for the future.
These decisions will need to safeguard
the future of networks today. The decisions
and standards need to be comprehensive,
flexible, and forward looking. They need to
cover everything from bandwidth delivery,
signal continuity, latency, energy efficiency
and more. Moreover, new generation
technologies, digital convergence, and
IoT network topologies, are making
the industry rethink the entire span of
datacentres and network architectures.
Making smart choices has never been
more vital than today.
While it is
possible to make
some educated
guesses on what
the next decade
holds in store,
no one knows
exactly what is
coming.
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