cabling, Enclosures,
Cabinets & Racks
THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’
The digitisation of business, Internet of Things and the advent of social media and online content are
driving the developments in today’s data centres, all of which have resulted in exponential data traffic
growth. Oene-Wim Stallinga, marketing director at Nexans, discusses why infrastructure design and
cabling must adapt to accommodate this and keep up with the times.
T
he role of data centres and
the data centre ecosystem
has been changing in
recent years. This is
placing pressure on data
centre network requirements.
Key drivers for increased traffic
and converged networks, such
as HD video, Internet of Things
(IoT), cloud and Big Data, have
changed our expectations of
networks. To give some idea of
the scope of these developments:
Ericsson predicts there will be
50 billion IoT enabled devices by
2020. Analyst IDC estimates 212
billion. New standards and the
proliferation of mobile devices are
leading to the need for more and
significantly faster wireless access
points and backbone connections.
Wireless evolution is inevitable,
with 24 billion web connected
devices, of which more than half
are connected wirelessly and can
transmit HD content.
Changing operational
requirements
All these developments are
enabled by networks that link
data centres and the active
equipment they contain. There
is an increasing need for high
quality networks supporting, for
example, virtualisation, cloud
systems, convergence of servers
and storage. This, in turn, has
significant implications for
bandwidth and latency demands,
April 2017 | 31