patching special feature
in lost customer service and sales, lost employee productivity, and damage to your reputation. A ‘smart’ cabling strategy combined with intelligent patching and other key aspects of Intelligent Infrastructure Management (IIM) can help to control business continuity risks, operational costs and improve network performance by integrating high bandwidth cabling for optimum performance and scalability, as well as an intelligent physical infrastructure management system for visibility of cabling connectivity. This visibility allows IT departments to see what is happening inside the physical infrastructure and where for quicker fault identification and resolution, root cause analysis and identification of existing assets that could be reclaimed rather than installing new equipment.
Design flexibility
The first stage in implementing a smart cabling strategy is to deploy reliable high speed data transport (HSDT) cabling solutions that address the needs for network throughput, latency, thermal management, power consumption and operational efficiency. Interoperable and scalable, these new HSDT copper
and fibre cabling solutions are helping deliver maximum infrastructure design flexibility that is both protocol and media agnostic (to support a wide array of data centre architectures) with unmatched network performance, for a range of network applications including Voice over IP and Gigabit Ethernet. Supporting these and new emerging technologies
through utilisation of 10 Gigabit Ethernet Copper, 10 Gigabit Ethernet Fibre, 40/100 Gigabit Ethernet, InfiniBand, OM4 and SFP+ cabling, HSDT cabling systems provide the capability to expand quickly as business needs evolve. More so, they provide a migration path to next generation application demands to maximize the cabling infrastructure lifecycle. Smar t cabling decisions can also lead to reductions
in energy usage that is good for both the business and the planet. HSDT solutions allow deployment of complex architectures with maximum throughput per formance for improved management and lowered operating costs. This contributes to sustainability initiatives by maximising real estate utilisation and thermal management. With a reliable and high performance cabling
infrastructure in place, the next stage in implementing a ‘smart’ cabling strategy requires the ability to see the connectivity inside the physical infrastructure. As the need for more applications and equipment
grows to satisfy business demands, connectivity becomes increasingly dense and therefore complex to manage and administer. These complexities require a robust management platform to gain visibility into the physical infrastructure which makes up the foundation for all network connectivity and performance.
Visibility While IIM solutions provide the missing link between real time network management tools and the physical layer that connects network devices together throughout the enterprise, analyst firms like Gar tner and Forrester have recognised a new category of management and monitoring solutions called Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM). Capabilities of DCIM solutions encompass intelligent patching and
connectivity management as well as aggregation of environmental data such as power, space, thermal footprint for capacity planning and better utilisation of data centre resources.
In the context of DCIM, intelligent patching solutions
provide visibility into the physical infrastructure by monitoring and managing real time patch field connectivity, as well as tracking and recording networked asset movements and configuration changes, throughout the enterprise and smart data centres. They automate the process of gathering and recording accurate, real time information on the status of connections across the network, thus minimising downtime and improving operational efficiencies. To accomplish these tasks, an intelligent patching solution must rely on three specific functions. The first includes intelligent patch panels and/or patch cords which enable monitoring of connected devices. The second is active hardware or modules which read or monitor the intelligent patch panels and then report changes in connectivity state. Actively managed patch panels will allow the data centre manager to locate and manage both physical and virtualised assets in the data centre. Third is a software platform which compiles this information, stores it in a database, and provides the ability for capacity planning, asset tracking, automated documentation and configuration management. Today’s passive systems rely on frequent manual documentation and updates to maintain these configurations which are changing dynamically.
Network reliability It is not uncommon for data centre operations to implement a network management system to monitor network and data traffic parameters in the logical layers of a network (OSI layers 3 and above). These solutions are critical for identifying broken or interrupted links that have occurred in these logical layers. Yet, they typically are incapable of ‘seeing’ into the physical infrastructure. Without the ability to precisely identify and isolate the source of physical infrastructure problems, IT staff members are forced to manually search through rows of data centre cabinets and racks, or trace links, to try and locate the root cause of a cabling error. Depending upon
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Patch cords with LED plugs help to communicate a connection status.
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