In business, whether we like to admit it or not, we often spend our days fighting fires. What I mean by this is that while we may have good strategic plans in place, these plans are put to the side to deal with the seemingly endless number of urgent problems that come up. However, the development and opening of a new data center is an opportunity to change the way things have been done in the past that created many of the problems faced today. While many designs may look good on paper and during the initial phases of operation of a data center, having operated other data centers in the past highlights issues that develop and get worse over time. Data center interconnections are one area where this occurs. Installing the first cross connects in the center are simple and straightforward. Over time as the numbers increase and existing enterprise connections churn to new providers, managing the cross connects manually becomes significantly more challenging. A short list of these problems includes overflowing cable trays, technician errors during installation and incorrect inventory leading to missed revenue or service problems.
A new approach to avoiding these problems is to use the Telescent Network Topology Manager (NTM), an automated cross connect system. The Telescent NTM offers complete cross connect lifecycle management. The system monitors, maps and controls the network during installation, reconfiguration and churn of cross connects to enable a Lights-Out Data Center with machine accurate inventory while preserving the value of the installed fiber plant. The NTM consists of 1,008 input and 1,008 output ports, each connected by a short, uninterrupted internal fiber connection. When a reconfiguration is requested, a robot-driven gripper removes an internal fiber from the original port and moves it to the desired new port. The patented algorithm identifies the unique path to route the fiber around the 1,007 other internal fibers in the system to establish a non-blocking, any-to-any connection. The Telescent NTM is strictly non-blocking and completely automated – essentially unlimited configuration and reconfiguration is possible with the Telescent system without any on-site, manual labor and with the original external fiber connections. The NTM can be configured in a leaf-spine network to allow scaling to >10,000 cross connects while still preserving the ability for any-to-any connectivity. Since the reconfigurations are controlled by software, all connections are recorded in a database and the state of any connection can be verified at any time providing machine accurate inventory for accurate billing to customers while also avoiding errors with reconfiguration. With a greenfield deployment, all enterprises can be pre-cabled to the Telescent NTM, leading to very easy management of cross connects even as connections increase and are reconfigured.
As described above, it is easy to see many of the operational benefits of an automated fiber cross connect system. One of the first is the improved customer service since cross connects can be provisioned in minutes rather than days. The value of this faster service can be demonstrated by customers that already request expedited delivery of a cross connect. An automated system also reduces the chance of manual errors by validating connections with the included power monitoring (avoiding Tx/Rx roll errors), while the optional OTDR functionality of the Telescent NTM can speed up identification of service issues if they occur. An Uptime Institute survey reports that 70% of downtime issues were caused by human errors, and we have heard reports that human intervention to solve a problem can cause issues on other connections a significant portion of the time. As an example, let’s consider the potential issues with incorrect inventory. This could be caused by a simple entry error from a technician. While this could cause missed revenue, a larger problem occurs with a reconfiguration request for this connection. Because of the database error, the reconfiguration is performed on the wrong connection, which causes an issue with another customer. Identifying the cause of the issue is a challenge since everything looks good in the database and testing would be performed on the wrong connection due to the inventory error. By performing the cross connect provisioning robotically, all these potential issues with manual intervention are avoided.
There are also financial benefits for the robotic Telescent NTM as well. While there is a capital expense for the Telescent NTM system, the robotic provisioning will reduce the operational expense for the provisioning of the cross connect. Since many data center companies are structured as a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT), operational expenses are viewed more critically than capital expenses. Investors understand the data center industry is capital intensive and see the value of spending capital to develop data centers. However, operational expense is an ongoing drain on the business, and REITs are rewarded for reducing their OpEx spending. The Telescent NTM helps reduce the OpEx for the cross connect provisioning while having a very long life.
As you are planning new greenfield deployments, take the chance to implement a solution that solves the problems that have occurred in existing data centers. While there will still be other fires to deal with, implementing an automated cross connect solution can prevent many problems from occurring in the first place.