Modern data centres and today ’ s underlying network infrastructure will continue to evolve to meet the requirements of leading technologies . As organisations look at ways to cut costs , reduce their environmental impact and converge traditionally disparate operational and IT systems , data centres are chasing to keep pace with assurance of deployment stability and uptime expected . We speak to Andrew Froehlich , President of West Gate Networks , and Lisa Schwartz , Director of Product Marketing at AEM , on the nuances of testing and troubleshooting cabling in data centre environments and why it is important to realise that testing needs have also evolved to keep pace .
wWhat are the different types of data centres from a cabling perspective ?
Firstly , there is the Centralised Cable . Small data centres or those that formed in an unstructured manner , such as preexisting data centres where technologies were adopted after the initial design that might include support of IoT initiatives , Single Pair Ethernet , or adoption of Hyper Converged Infrastructure ( HCI ), are just a few examples .
Centralised cable
These types of data centres will centralise cabling and patch panels into a consolidated rack or group of racks . Servers and storage located in racks surrounding the patch panels can connect with relatively short patch cables . However , the further away servers and other network-connected devices are , the longer the patch cables need to be . It ’ s often the case that cable management becomes disorganised and sloppy as the
number and lengths of cabling required to connect data centre devices becomes significant in such a small and centralised section of the server room .
Secondly , there is End-of-Row cabling . Looking to alleviate much of the cabling congestion of a centralised patch panel design , larger legacy data centres ( DC ) are known to utilise distributed cable patch panels and switching / fibre channel switch hardware into several locations within the DC facility . In many cases , each DC row will have their own rack that is designated for cabling and patch panels .
End-of-Row
This is known as an ‘ End-of-Row ’. All devices mounted in this row connect to the DC network at the End-of-Row distribution point . While this design does help to disperse the density of patch cables to multiple locations , the layout can still suffer from cable congestion in DC that have racks stacked full of equipment that must be connected .
Lastly , we have Top-of-Rack . The Topof-Rack design is newer than the Endof-Row and centralised architectures . Using this plant blueprint , the cabling termination points become distributed even further . Each equipment rack in the DC is installed with an Ethernet and / or fibre channel switch at the top .
Top-of-Rack
Any equipment installed in the rack is in close proximity to network switch ports .
Understanding data centre Cable Plant layouts
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