30 Minute Interview

The downside of blades, Gigabit Ethernet and fiber

Robert Kleinschmidt, Managing Director, Asia Pacific, Panduit spoke to Mohd Shariff PA on the challenges faced by facility managers and how power cable provisioning can help them size data centers to extend the shelf life of said centers.

Robert Kleinschmidt

Data center managers are embracing trends that better align with present business strategies, increase operational efficiency, and provide a technology platform to satisfy their growth requirements. A data center houses a large number of devices with complex networking schemes, so a sound cabling topology is essential. For today’s data center LAN and SAN environments, switch-to-server connections require high performance cabling with flexibility, and headroom for upcoming bandwidth-intensive applications.

Poor data cable provisioning eats into utility costs

New technologies such as blades servers, Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet and fiber are increasingly deployed in data centers as these increases operational efficiencies but at the same time they also increase power consumption and complicate cabling and cooling. Many organizations are looking to the benefits of 10 Gigabit Ethernet to support new application requirements. Forward thinking network planners should carefully consider how new cabling technologies can be deployed to support convergence and high bandwidth applications such as compute clusters, grid computing, and storage area networks.

Cabling infrastructure provisioning should be viewed as an investment that requires a functional and protective containment. It is not advisable to lay power or data cables on the slab beneath the raised floor each time a new server cabinet is added to the network.

Badly designed data center cabling can inhibit airflow beneath the floor and lead to disruption of MACs (Move, Add and Change). We recommend that data cables be put in the hot aisle and raised while power cables can be placed in the cold aisle, down.

Facility managers, who are responsible for designing data centers should do proper capacity planning (for power, cooling and space management) to ensure reliability and scalability, flexibility and fault tolerance to reduce operational costs. Additionally they should know their IT loads (primarily servers) and facility loads (cooling).

The biggest challenge

The biggest challenge faced by facility managers is IT itself. Collaborating with IT is a major challenge in data center. It is all about how clued in the facility manager is about new technology that can help the data center reduce operational cost. One must be able to understand the ongoing changes. Many organizations that invest huge amounts of money on their data centers, are not up to date on new technology. In this way when they realize that a particular change has to be made, they will have to make yet another investment, which could have been reduced if the facility manager was [abreast with current developments].

A facility manager should be able to understand the capacity and volume of the data center and address issues based on the future needs of his organization.

Strategy for key markets

We look at India as an opportunity to grow our business because there are huge IT investments which are going into setting up data centers and SMEs too are adopting IT in a big way. We think that innovation is required in the market, which is why we invest 10 percent of our revenue in R&D every year and produces an ever-growing range of network and electrical solutions that are committed to quality, innovation and excellence resulting in enhanced performance and reduced cost of ownership. We are expecting good growth in India during the next three years and operate at Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, and Delhi.

We have over 55,000 products encompassing data connectivity, routing systems, wiring accessories, safety maintenance accessories, printers, software and labeling solutions.

Globally we do sales in excess of $700 million annually backed by seven plants and multiple offices in the US, supported by a global manufacturing and sales network, including factories in Singapore and China, and offices in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Korea and Australia to meet the immediate regional needs of the local market.

The list of customers using our structured cabling and electrical accessories in their data centers includes the likes of Cisco, Juniper, Motorola, Yahoo, Google, Adobe, McAfee, Fidelity and more. We have number of small and medium companies that are using our solution.

mohammed.shariff@expressindia.com