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TRIDENT TECHNOLOGY SERVICES
CABLING FOR THE FUTURE
BASSEL ALHALABI, MANAGING DIRECTOR, TRIDENT TECHNOLOGY SERVICES, TALKS ABOUT THE LATEST TRENDS SHAPING DATA CENTRE CABLING IN THE MIDDLE EAST.
WHAT ARE SOME OF THE BEST PRACTICES YOU RECOMMEND FOR CABLING THE DATA CENTRE? When planning for a greenfield data centre, the key operational objective is to have a facility that will sustain efficiently over the longest possible period with an optimised performance. Since physical infrastructure is considered the data centre backbone, it is critical to plan for resiliency, future-proofing, and performance assurance. As a general rule, data centre operational growth is linked to hardware and software capabilities, which are correlated to physical infrastructure capacity. For example, if your network growth plans are significant, you will need to make capacity provisions for racks, cabinets, structured cabling, and pathways to make the necessary infrastructure to support your IT plans. So, the message here is to design a scalable system and identify, reduce, or eliminate any potential bottlenecks impacting the performance of your cabling system. Following best practices regarding cable fill allowance and limits as well as including some redundancy will help alleviate these challenges. It may be difficult for some data centre operators to know exactly what bandwidth they will need in the foreseeable future. However, in reality, things don’t slow down, and you have to make provisions for higher performance sooner than later. It would be the best practice to assess and evaluate a physical infrastructure system that can address your IT needs for a couple of technology refreshes. Yes, you might incur a little more CapEx initially as a result, but when you think of how disruptive an entire upgrade process CABLING INSIGHT
is because an inferior physical infrastructure system was considered and installed on day one, along with the associated downtime, it quickly makes sense to implement the best solution that will perform well beyond what you need in day one and really consider this as an investment versus a pure expense. WHICH CABLING TOPOLOGY SHOULD USERS PICK FOR DATA CENTRE CABLING? There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all for selecting a data centre topology. The reason is that each data centre is so different and its requirements in terms of network design and architecture. For example, an on-premise, colocation or hyper scale facility varies tremendously, and the variations within each of these segments span a wide range of uniqueness. Regardless of the individual data centre function or requirements, a common theme is to remain as flexible as possible when it comes to topologies. A recommendation on this topic would be to look comprehensively at each element that may be impacted by the type of configuration/topologies that are ultimately deployed. For example, consideration should be given to the amount of space, power, cooling that will be required to operate the data centre well into the future. We often still hear about facilities that typically run out of one of these three elements. However, the other two characteristics may even have additional capacity to yield but cannot be based on a shortcoming of one interrelated feature. Data centres will remain very dynamic entities; therefore, deploying solutions that can sometimes scale up or
down is hugely desirable. Consider solutions that are modular where elements or features can be added or subtracted with minimal disruptions. IS FIBRE OPTIC NOW THE MEDIA OF CHOICE FOR A DATA CENTRE? Fibre optics infrastructure has the highest data rates and longest reach. Twisted pair copper is limited to speeds of 10 Gb/s at lengths up to 100 meters, and while direct attach copper modules like SFP+ and QSFP+ can go faster, but they are typically limited in the distance to about five meters. There is no doubt that fibre optics infrastructure is becoming very desirable, popular and growing media of choice particularly in switch-toswitch connections and for data centres’ communications in general. Depending on the data centre’s function, fibre optics may encompass nearly 100% of the cabling infrastructure. The key message here is that although fibre optics do provide a tremendous amount of benefits, careful consideration will still be required to make the best decisions. DO YOU SEE A FUTURE FOR COPPER IN THE DATA CENTRE? There is such a large installed amount of copper in data centres around the world that an individual would find it difficult to think copper would not have a future, in some way, shape or form. We have heard the same claims for years that copper is dead within the data centre. That does not seem to be completely true. The amount of technological developments relative to copper structured cabling has been remarkable. There are clearly
