FIBRE OPTIC NETWORKING
Supporting Facilities Management with Fibre
Network Convergence
By: Andrew Cliffin, Manager Public Networks, Western Europe, R&M
Introduction
Andrew Cliffin
explains how fibre can
help accommodate
fast changes in IT
Today, facilities departments need
to support fast-moving IT and business
processes, while improving and
innovating security and accommodating
fast changes in IT and their own
business areas. The way we work and
engage with our work environments is
changing rapidly. This is largely driven
by the fast rise of innovations such as
mobile devices, wireless connectivity,
Bring Your Own Device, Internet of
Things, Big Data and Cloud services.
As more people work from home,
in public spaces or in transit, they
expect the same type and quality of
connectivity they have in the office. As
they increasingly bring their own devices
to work, they also expect the same
hassle-free connectivity they have at
home. All this requires bandwidth and
increased flexibility. How to do all this in
a safe, coordinated and managed way?
Fibre can help!
Network Convergence
Until relatively recently, discrete groups
of in-building resources were devoted
to one particular function: telephony,
Internet, LAN, security, building
infrastructure, data... However, we’re
currently seeing integrated pools of
computers, storage and networking
resources increasingly being shared
across multiple applications, enabled
by highly efficient and policy-driven
processes. Convergence allows users
to make the most of increasingly
sophisticated system intelligence. It can
provide enormous efficiency increases,
from both technical and business
perspectives, centralising management
of IT resources, consolidating systems,
boosting resource utilisation rates and
lowering costs.
Deployment of converged
networks helps reduce overall power
consumption, improves cooling
efficiency and enables the introduction
of further energy-saving measures.
Ventilation in computer rooms, for
example, can be smaller, function
with greater efficiency and require
less energy. Valuable space can also be
saved, which ultimately improves energy
consumption. The latest generation of
cabling also has an improved noise ratio,
and therefore requires less power for
noise cancelling.
Efficient Ethernet
Fibre also enables the introduction of
Networks and connectivity need to be evaluated as a key component of your physical infrastructure.
32 NETCOMMS europe Volume V Issue 5 2015
Energy Efficient Ethernet, according
to the IEEE 802.3az standard. When
a link is idle, power consumption of
physical layer devices is reduced. This is
done by placing part of the transmission
circuit into low-power mode without
impacting data transmission. An
EEE-defined protocol enables
Ethernet devices (in LPI mode) to
keep operational parameters updated.
This preserves link stability and avoids
disconnections. When the link is
required once again, it is simply ‘woken
up’ after a predetermined delay.
Power over Ethernet, or PoE, is also
facilitated with network convergence.
This combines power and data
transmission in a single cable, allowing
for extensive use of powering devices
using data cabling. The original PoE
standard was introduced a decade ago
and supported up to 12.95 watts, but
with the introduction of PoE+ in 2009,
up to 25.5 watts is supported. PoE can
now power devices over long lengths of
data cable.
New Monitoring
In today’s fast-growing, dynamic and
increasingly complex environments,
troubleshooting or making
infrastructural changes on the basis
of incorrect, out-of-date or unreliable
documentation is not unlike walking
a tightrope without a safety net.
Furthermore, manual fault-finding
or cable tracking is no longer a viable
option. Automating well-chosen
managing and monitoring tasks can
play an important part in achieving
(almost) 100 per cent uptime. There
are several solutions, which might
seem to overlap, or even appear
interchangeable, but there are marked
differences between them. Making poor
choices will only result in additional
costs in the near future, so it’s worth
examining these. To determine which
type of solution best suits your needs,
you need to know exactly what these
needs are. Companies should first list
the business requirements they wish to
meet by implementing a monitoring
and management solution. This
should include infrastructural and
environmental considerations and future
growth plans.
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