It’s been 30 years since fiber optic cables ushered in a new networking era that fueled the rise of the internet and our modern digital world.
Fiber optic cables, with their ability to transmit more data at a higher speed, became the backbone of the internet, and during the COVID-19 pandemic became a lifeline with work, school and social life shifting online. Fiber optic connections were no longer a luxury but a necessity.
It is hard to imagine navigating the COVID-19 pandemic without the internet which allowed the world to work, learn, play, and connect while staying physically remote.
A decade ago, if your boss told you that your “head was in the clouds” it probably meant you were goofing off on company time, but today we all have our heads in the clouds as businesses have migrated much of their workloads to “the cloud”.
When it comes to data center terminology you may know DC from your CR, but you most likely are more invested in your ROI rather than understanding cold aisles vs. hot aisles. DCs or data centers have their own terminology even from CRs or computer rooms.
Your return on investment or ROI on a data center may very well be a function of data center design including factors such as cold aisles – aisles where racks face forward into the aisle and airflow is directed so that it can enter the front of the racks in a an efficient manner – and hot aisles -- aisles between two rows of racks where the heat from the back of the equipment discharges.
Our concept of data centers has shifted from the early days of computing when a “data center” was simply a “computer room” where a massive mainframe – some weighing 30 tons! – was housed. Data centers kept on evolving, adapting to colocation services, virtual servers, cloud computing and edge networks. “M
As 5G mobile technology rolls out across the country networks are responding with seemingly contrasting decentralized edge computing and centralized C-RAN architecture that, surprisingly, can not only coexist, but can take advantage of existing infrastructure.
Since the first 32GFC Gen 6 Fibre Channel devices for storage area networking went into production in 2016 the amount of world-wide data has increased by four times. The industry, led by the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), is prepared for the next bump in bandwidth with the FCIA predicting that “2021 will be the year of 64GFC Gen 7.”
We live, work, and play in a connected world but that would not be possible if there were not a set of standards to guide the installation, maintenance and testing of products and technologies.
Structured cabling is much more than preventing your data center floor from looking like a big bowl of pasta. Sure, structured cabling will take care of “spaghetti cabling” issues or that tangled rats’ nest of wires often lurking in a business backroom.
If the data center is at the heart of business in the digital age, then this past year has been a significant stress test as this crucial infrastructure has been under pressure from emerging technologies and world events. While evolving technologies mean that data centers can never be static and are in a constant state of change, the confluence of emerging technologies such as 5G, AI, IoT and Edge are putting unprecedented high-bandwidth and low-latency demands on data centers.