Performance and Quality: Bandwidth requirements are growing
exponentially each year and require the highest quality cabling
media and materials, impeccable installation practices, and an ideal
environment to achieve performance specifications. Now more than
ever, designers and installers should adhere to the installation best
practices and standards guidelines in ANSI/BICSI 002-2019,
Data Center Design and Implementation Best Practices.
FIGURE 13: The push towards 100 Gb/s to 400 Gb/s optics at increasingly
longer connectivity distances due to hyperscale and cloud architectures requires
the utmost in connectivity performance with the highest quality infrastructure
components. Image source: © NRL/NASA/Chris Gunn.
Labor Costs: As previously shown in Figure 1, more than 20 percent
of data center infrastructure spend can be attributed to labor costs,
including cabling installation, testing, and operational support. This
is breaking budgets, which limits service growth, product revenue,
and quality of service. Although optical fiber and test equipment
manufacturers, for example, have introduced impressive advancements
in packing more fiber strands in reduced outer diameter (OD)
cables and have introduced more automated and faster test equipment,
more must be done to save on labor costs.
FIGURE 14: To lower labor costs significantly, it takes continual introductions
of faster, easier, and more reliable data center component innovations. This is
essential for any enterprise data center, especially for a colocation data center’s
profitability and that of e-commerce retail.
April/May/June 2020 I 45
Time to Market: The expediency in which connected infrastructure must
be deployed and turned over to production is critical in meeting online
service demands. Based on experience, in most cases, teams are failing
to meet deadlines due to their existing infrastructures’ inability to
accommodate emerging technologies, as well as meeting high-bandwidth
and connected infrastructure growth demands; others may be
meeting deadlines but at high costs.
FIGURE 15: In order to support future connectivity growth needs which are often
unpredictable, companies are left with the costly alternative of overbuilding their
existing infrastructures, expediting materials and construction or, even worse,
delaying product launches until additional capacity can become available.