Speed and greater operational efficiency

WHEN IT COMES TO CABLING infrastructure for data centre deployments European organisations have always had similar objectives, namely:

 High Reliability - resilience and support for high availability IT
services 24 x 365 with up to 99.999% guaranteed uptime
 High Flexibility - easy to manage, accommodates changing
business requirements, and be easy to deploy with efficient moves,
adds and changes
 High Scalability - must support data centre growth rates, both in
additional IT equipment and increasing data speeds, such as
40G and 100G over time
 Energy Efficient - supports the need to improve data centre
energy efficiency and lower PUE
 Long Service Life - meets the challenges of the data centre over
the next 15 to 20 years.
With the growth of data, video and connected devices, many organisations across all industry sectors have found their existing data centres are running out of space. At the same time enterprise IT departments are experiencing the growth of new applications and cloud services that can improve competitiveness and productivity, aligned with the need to adopt new design and deployment principles to support new, flatter network architectures whilst virtualising their network real estate. Whether enterprises deploy their own IT services from their data centre or selectively outsource from cloud providers, the need for fast and flexible provisioning is crucial.
However, what has now become a prerogative is the need to respond to changing needs with fast and flexible provisioning within the data centre. IT departments, under extreme pressure to deliver projects faster than ever, are looking to cabling infrastructure to stay ahead of the demand for applications, networking and IT equipment growth. After all, it is the physical cabling that ties together all the switches, servers and storage devices. We have found that fast provisioning is now one of the key criteria in delivering cabling infrastructure in new data centre deployments. This can be highlighted through some examples of cabling infrastructure in new data centre deployments from leading European enterprises.
Tesco, one of the world’s largest retailers, chose to co-locate its UK IT infrastructure with Digital Reality as part of its data centre consolidation strategy and to expand its online shopping and banking operations. In order to meet tight timescales, a Corning structured cabling solution was chosen for its modular, scalable, agile and rapid deployment capabilities. Corning and its installation partner needed to meet an impressive 3-week order to deliver all of the cabling components.
The implementation of the modular cabling system meant that the PODs in the data halls became plug and play with servers quickly installed and then simply connected to the core network LAN with multi-fibre MTP connections. This high-density, factory terminated and tested modular solution enabled the installers to connect cabling components faster and more easily. Cabling time was reduced by 50% in comparison to the time it took with traditional direct patching with long cords. The modular plug and play capability helped to facilitate a complete POD installation within 72 hours, ensuring that the tight timeframes were met in order to migrate services and have them fully operational in the new data centre. Michael Fitzgerald, Global Data Centre Manager at Tesco commented, “The Corning Cable Infrastructure in the new data centre significantly helps us service our business operations faster and easier.”
Moreover, Deutche Börse, one of the world’s leading exchange organisations was eager to have T7, its new global trading architecture, in place as fast as possible. Deutche Börse chose to co-locate its new data centre with Equinix in Frankfurt, in order to provide faster trading services to traders and enable trading firms to install their own systems within the co-location areas, close to the exchange’s T7 systems. One of the bigger challenges with the design of the new data centre was that the entire cabling (fibre and copper trunks) had to be in place ahead of moving the trading systems. Again very tough timelines needed to be met, as the new data centre needed to be ready for testing within three months of the start of the project.
For this project the need to deploy up to 66,000 fibre and 6,000 copper ports meant that a high-density, factory terminated and tested modular cabling solution was key to delivering the project on time. In addition, an innovative ‘Universal Polarity’ wiring of the fibre optic modules prevented polarity problems and ensured compatibility, high performance, and consistent quality throughout the system, alleviating any operational delays or disruption.
Michael Gruth, Head of Data Centres and Voice at Deutsche Börse commented, “The joint team of Corning and Equinix did an excellent job in specifying the length for every single trunk ahead of the installation of racks and trays, avoiding excessive over length. The end result was that T7 went online in-time, made possible by the supportive and experienced team of Corning and Equinix.”
Another key component of delivering greater operation efficiency has been the requirement to provide high density cabling to support the need for energy savings. Data centre owners are constantly searching for ways to address the increasing costs and demand for energy by improving power and cooling efficiency, as well as sourcing energy efficient IT equipment and green energy supplies. Tissat, a leading Spanish company, required a new modern data centre to address the market need for cloud services and provide the latest eco-efficient technologies in order to cut energy consumption. Tissat’s Walhalla data centre in Valencia, Spain, represents a major investment and advance in technological and energy excellence to deliver eco-efficient cloud services. In support of an operational excellence and cost-efficiency approach, Tissat needed to implement a Datacentre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solution, which enabled holistic management of its energy, climate, security and IT infrastructure.

This makes it possible to optimise the energy efficiency of the infrastructures and support the fast and flexible provisioning of services as well as scalable capacity. Tissat chose a Corning optical fibre cable infrastructure design that contributed to the increased energy efficiency of the facility.

The high fibre counts and low profile of Corning optical cable provide up to 30% reduction in physical cable space, keeps void space clear of congestion with no cooling energy losses in the raised floors. In addition, the optical interfaces on switches and servers require less power to operate than copper equivalents – typically 0.5W per port versus 15W per port for 10G connectivity. As a result the optical fibre cabling solution was perfectly adapted to the energy efficiency needs of the Walhalla data centre.
Here again Tissat needed to meet a stringent timeframe to inaugurate the data centre by using modular multi-fibre pre-terminated MTP connections. According to Carmen Garcia, Commercial Director, Tissat, “The Corning cabling solution was perfectly adapted to Walhalla’s pioneering needs. They facilitated implementation in record time and enabled the data centre to evolve in accordance with the rapidly changing demands of the market.”
With the continuing requirement to evolve data centres, the cabling infrastructure must provide reliability, manageability and flexibility as well as enable easy migration to higher speeds such as 40G and 100G, irrespective of the transceiver type. Both in context of project and ongoing management of the data centres, more and more data centre owners and operators find that new applications and services have tight deadlines with a rapid time to operation. In these situations it is important for cabling infrastructure manufacturers to provide short-lead times for components.

In addition, the system components designed for easy access are vital because any planned moves, adds and changes need to happen quickly and without disrupting the data centre’s operations. Installation processes need to support fast provisioning of cabling trunks throughout the data centre enabling the IT team to respond quickly to changing business needs. State-of-the-art modularity, ease-of-use simplicity and high quality factory pre-terminated cabling ensures that this infrastructure can cost-effectively and quickly adapt to the demand.