Cabling Special

A case for cabling

Akhtar Pasha takes you on a tour of three interesting cabling deployments.

Affiliated Computer Services’ (ACS) Indian operations make use of IBDN cabling from the Belden CDT Networking Division for its facilities in Bangalore and Kochi. Although the company uses Cat5e, the cable can handle up to 1 Gbps data rates and the network has 3,000 nodes on it. For the Kochi centre, ACS has deployed Cat6 cabling with an IBDN-BIX patching solution for data and voice.

Explains Shreejit Menon, Senior Manager, IT & Telecom Operations, ACS India: “The technology decision of investing in a horizontal system such as structured cabling is governed by factors like how much business is coming to the country and the number of people required to deliver the work. This in turn determines the number of network nodes required, the kind of application that will support these people, and the headroom to support network growth for expanding the network and deploying future technologies.”

If you are running Fast Ethernet then installing Cat6 cabling will enable you to make two technology leaps—to Gigabit Ethernet, and beyond. This will prevent disruption to your business in future, easily offsetting the additional cost of installing Cat6 cabling.

The decision to implement Belden structured cables with the IBDN-BIX patching solution was taken before Menon joined the organisation. He nevertheless says, “Belden gave a Proof of Concept demo for the Kochi facility. The company is known for its credibility, quality and innovation.”

Menon continues with some details: “The IBDN system has provided us with a reliable and flexible cabling system that supports voice and data communication within the building. The low space requirements of the BIX Cross-Connect fields have helped us make more space available for other uses. This system’s design is flexible enough to allow for expansion; technicians can simply add or change hubs and routers without dismantling or re-designing the BIX system design.

“We also like the way the BIX Cross-Connect fields make our wiring closets look neat and tidy by allowing us to use the exact amount of jumper wire needed for each inter-connection. The use of consolidation points has enabled us to easily add extra communication outlets to our work areas without having to run new cables all the way back to the wiring closets.”

Cat6 for CAD

Motorola is a Fortune 100 global communications leader that provides seamless mobility products and solutions across broadband, embedded systems and wireless networks. For their latest facility of around 2,400 ports in Bangalore, the company has deployed a Belden CDT Cat6 solution.

States Goodwin Edison, IT Operations Manager Worldwide, Engineering Computing, Motorola, “Both the facilities in the engineering group of Motorola are involved in engineering design, and the amount of data transferred, mostly CAD data, is huge. Our current data capacity is 30 TB, but this is expected to grow to 60 TB by next year.”

Muses Edison, “If you’re going to install cabling, do it once, plan for the inevitability of your information applications, and do it the first time because you don’t want to have to do it again.” In this deployment the challenge lay in designing and provisioning. They had to strike a balance between the technology needed today (so that the facility was useful for day-to-day work) and the technologies they could need sometime in the future.

“Despite the fact that worldwide Motorola uses structured cabling solutions from Avaya, the Indian office chose a structured cabling solution from the Belden CDT Networking Division,” Edison says. The turnaround-to-implement worked in Belden’s favour. Avaya had quoted 7-8 weeks, whereas Belden offered to do the same in 2-3 weeks. “Even though our Bagmane Park facility was not a Belden deployment, the company undertook the responsibility of supporting it. What’s more, the cost was less than that of Avaya.”

Edison suggests that if you are currently running Fast Ethernet, then installing Cat6 cabling will help you to make technology leaps to Gigabit Ethernet—and beyond. Enhanced Cat5 on the other hand might not be capable of supporting technologies beyond Gigabit Ethernet. Enhanced Cat5 offers a tightly controlled cabling infrastructure with a bandwidth of 100 MHz. This is sufficient to support data rates up to 1,000 Mbps. Cat6 expands on this by setting an upper frequency limit of 200 MHz. This allows existing protocols to operate with more headroom, and provides the infrastructure to cope with future developments in data communication technology.

India’s first 10G on copper

India’s first 10 Gigabit Ethernet solution over copper connects 3,500 nodes at the i2 Technologies software development facility in Bangalore. The company is using the ADC KRONE CopperTen 10 Gigabit Ethernet structured cabling system. Explains Gurumurthy Iyer, Senior Director, IS&T, i2 Technologies India, “Our data centre is a high-performance lab also called ITL—Integrated Test Lab—where our developers create supply chain products that have to be tested for performance, scalability and reliability (PSR testing). Additionally, these solutions (multi-megabyte files) are transferred across the development facility. PSR testing requires high-end infrastructure, and our processes rely on distributed computing consuming large amounts of bandwidth.”

Iyer recalls that the decision in favour of 10G over copper was influenced by a technology presentation made by Bala Chandran, Managing Director of ADC KRONE India, 18 months ago. Iyer explains: “In 2005 they became the first vendor to launch 10G on copper, and we identified a requirement for it in our data centre last year. We had the option of using 10G over fibre but it was too xpensive to deploy, and from the switch side 10G on fibre is yet to be released. We found that 10G over copper offers the same throughput at a lower cost.”

Iyer believes that you need to plan meticulously when it comes to cabling. “Investments in 10G (CopperTen) have future-proofed our horizontal systems for the next 10 years. The RoI in a 10G Ethernet solution is determined by higher productivity, lesser latency, and the speed of the network—leading to a savings in time resulting in dollars saved per hour.”

akhtar@expresscomputeronline.com