One key outcome of the COVID pandemic is that it accelerated IT and data center trends by several years. Digital transformation that was expected to take years to materialize happened in just months during the pandemic. This acceleration has caused data center managers to reevaluate their operations, and automation has become a key consideration. As stated by Rich Miller in a recent article on the Eight Trends that will Shape the Data Center Industry in 2021, “the rapid embrace of data center automation is about to enter a new phase, in which automation and robotics play a larger role in facility management.” This comment is supported by a recent Uptime Institute survey that found that 73% of data center managers expect to increase their use of automation because of the pandemic. One process where automation could improve performance and reduce costs is fiber interconnections in multi-tenant data centers (MTDCs).
While COVID has certainly created a renewed interest in automation, it is worth asking why fiber interconnections haven’t been automated already. After all, every other level in the optical network stack has seen improvements by introducing software management and automation, but the physical fiber layer has remained a “dumb pipe.” As will be discussed below, new technology must offer benefits across a company before it can be implemented. There must be technical benefits for the network architect, financial benefits for the CFO, operational improvements for the engineering team and so forth.
Finally, the new system must not just offer benefits today, it must be capable of scaling to meet the demands of tomorrow. If one of these groups has doubts, it is always easy to justify “just doing things the way we know how.” However, there are now automated cross connect systems that meet all these needs today and can grow to meet the scale required in the future. And “just keep doing the status quo” has never been a winning long-term strategy for technology companies.
Before introducing any new technology, any change in operations needs to be economically justified. While introducing robotics and automation to MTDCs certainly has a “cool factor” for the network architects, the project must also get approved by the CFO and then implemented by the operations team. Business plans for introducing automation are typically justified by the reduced operational expense involved in the manual process.
In one study, Cisco found that network automation reduced OpEx by 50 to 70% which led to a very favorable ROI. Similar results have been found for automation of the fiber cross connect, with a payback of between 2 to 3 years on the 10+ year lifetime of the equipment. A pay-as-you-grow design is preferred since this can match expenses to revenue as the equipment is deployed. While the business case is typically justified by the OpEx savings since these savings are easy to quantify, there are also many other benefits to automation of the cross connect. These include improved fiber management and avoidance of full cable trays, improved customer service through faster turn-on of services, better inventory management, improved troubleshooting and reduced outages caused by operator error. Getting humans out of the process leads to operational and performance benefits.
While the financial justification is a major concern, MTDC operators must consider other factors before introducing any new equipment into the network. As demonstrated with the COVID pandemic, data centers are critical infrastructure and reliability of the infrastructure is a key concern. Before any new equipment is installed in the network, it must pass rigorous reliability and performance testing. The gold standard for reliability testing is the NEBS Level 3 qualification. Passing NEBS Level 3 certification ensures that the system has been independently tested under a variety of operating conditions and will be able to meet the customer expectations. Added concerns are whether the system preserves the connections during a power outage, if the system is field-maintainable and if the system offers diagnostic capability about its status and the network.