FEATURE: CABLING STANDARDS
doesn’t matter – you make the choice
based on the business.
Dave Hughes, Director, Field
Application Engineering, MEA,
CommScope
applications and higher speeds. The
ability to cope with change quickly and
cost-effectively is critical for business.
It’s now about a solid high-speed
migration that is linked to the strategic
intent of the business. It’s about
designing a system that can meet
demands and not compromising on an
application to suit a static infrastructure.
It’s the breadth of products and
solutions that can be adapted to
suit different customer needs that
is important. It’s not a ‘one size fits
all’ approach – it’s about listening to
customer requirements, finding out
what’s relevant to them specifically
and designing for both now and into
the future.
So now it’s a design and validation
exercise. We use various tools and
frameworks to be able to help
customers with that strategic intent
of their business, because if they
can’t migrate quickly, it impairs their
competitive advantage.
From a CommScope perspective, it’s
all about solving customer issues and
giving customers the scalability to
migrate as and when technologies
dictate and when the business needs
to adapt. Whether its single mode or
multimode from a fibre standpoint, it
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INTELLIGENTCIO
The debate on single or multimode
in a data centre is very relevant, but
again is based on context. For example,
in the large hyperscale environments
it makes sense to deploy single mode
due to the scale of the facility. But
in most enterprise and multi-tenant
environments, multimode is still a very
viable option, especially when you
consider the advancements in short-
wave division multiplexing (SWDM)
and OM5. This was developed by
CommScope and can be deployed
to reduce fibre counts and extend
distances beyond 100G. In my opinion
this drastically increases the life of
multimode applications in a large
amount of user environments.
Q
How long can
customers expect
their cabling
infrastructure
to last?
Again, this comes
back to the
migration aspect.
It’s now about a
well thought out
approach to the
design and again
it comes back to the strategic intent of
business. Whether that’s a greenfield site
or brownfield site, it really is designing and
validating where you are now and where
you want to go. This is where we talked
about OM5. OM5 gives you a longevity
beyond 100G, which extends the life of
the system and can be easily adapted as
and when required – very cost-effectively
and without any major re-cabling works.
Even if end users are not using that
bandwidth now, it’s very easy for them to
scale in the future by just changing out
cords and transceivers. The idea is to keep
the core infrastructure stable.
A
They don’t want to be making major
changes to a live data centre in the
coming years, which is a reality for
a number of operators. Using our
design tools, performance calculators
and application guidelines allows the
user to make an informed choice. For
example, I may be using 16G fibre
channel now but what if I want to
go to 32G in two years? We can then
model and look at either a new build
or brownfield site and validate or plan
for this type of capacity, then build an
infrastructure that meets both current
and future demands, that will scale as
the business dictates.
Q
Are there any
differences in
performance
standards for
advanced copper
and fibre cabling?
There are two
areas to this.
You’ve got the
data centre
environment
and you’ve got
the building
environment. Within the building
environment, Category 6A is fast
becoming the norm and has been the
recommendation of many standards
and institutions. In the Middle East and
Africa, 6A is probably used more readily
than other geographies. In other
areas, we’re still in 6/6A transition. The
aspect that is driving 6A, apart from
bandwidth, is Power over Ethernet (PoE)
and the demand for a connected and
efficient world. The ability to run power
and data in the same cable offers
both cost-efficiencies and reduces
infrastructure complexity.
A
Due to its construction and performance
criteria, 6A has the ability to meet the
emerging standards for PoE applications
more efficiently – 90 watts and beyond.
This is again to meet future applications
such as high power WAPs, surveillance
cameras, IoT etc.
Within the data centre, you have two
primary areas – multimode and single
mode connectivity. As discussed,
we see OM5 now becoming more
prevalent in the enterprise space due
to the enhancements and benefits
of SWDM and its viability and cost
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