Author
Shobhit Jain
A growing economy and surging population in India are causing city congestion, including a worsening traffic condition. According to a 2018 study on worst traffic flow in the world, Mumbai and Delhi came in first and fourth respectively among the list of 403 cities across 56 countries.
CLICK TO TWEET: CommScope's Shobhit Jain explains why future-ready mindset starts from the data centre design stage.
My daily commute to work is a prime example: I’m stuck in the traffic on a six-lane highway where it converges into just two lanes ahead. As the car inches forward each time, I find myself repeating in my head “Who designed this highway?” Clearly, I didn’t think this was the most brilliant approach to improve traffic flow.
And only recently, the plan to add another three lanes to ease the bottleneck has begun, and the road situation couldn’t get more chaotic due to the construction works.
Data center managers go through similar thinking processes when designing the network. The design stage is critical; it practically decides the outcome of a project, and most importantly, whether the investments are fully maximized.
Why some data centre customers struggle with infrastructure design
Many customers consider structured cabling as part of the facility function that should be deployed when building the physical data centre, whereas others believe structured cabling is integral to the overall IT infrastructure.
Customers who fall in the former category are usually the ones who struggled the most when designing a passive infrastructure. What is similar in both schools of thought is that the connectivity infrastructure is required to be in place before any active equipment is designed or deployed. This often results in data center customers designing the connectivity infrastructure isolated from the network infrastructure and eventually causing both financial and time loss.
The time taken between the data centre build and the network design implementation can range from six to 12 months. During this period, network operators are likely to see discrepancies between the implemented cabling solution and the actual requirement when deploying the active equipment.
Future-ready mindset starts from the design stage
How do we then make sure the right decisions or effective planning are implemented during the infrastructure design stage for a data centre?
Generally, there are two approaches to a project design - the top down and bottom-up approach. It is critical to understand the business goals and then start building the components designed to achieve these goals. At the core of either approach, data centre managers have to keep in mind during the design process that the network infrastructure within the data centre must be able to scale and is agile to support future 5G applications that would require higher bandwidth and speed.
Evaluating data centre requirements to meet future needs of how data is being consumed with the arrival of 5G will put organizations ahead of the game.
CommScope is committed to serving as a trusted partner who understands customers’ business needs and provides insight to future data centre ecosystems and technology trends.
Do you want to avoid the bottleneck and reach your destination faster?
