As reported in a recent Foundations newsletter (subscribe here: Foundations) “Equinix recently notified customers that prices would be increasing for both Cross Connects and Smart Hands, specifically citing the global macro environment including rising energy, construction and labor costs.” While Equinix does have a history of raising prices as demonstrated by the graph below of their average price per interconnect for the past 5 quarters, of particular note in this price increase notice is the reference to rising labor costs. With inflation exceeding 8% and at a 40 year high in the United States it’s not surprising that Equinix is trying to pass along increasing costs to their customers.
Of course, the data center industry is not the first industry to be hit with rising labor costs. Many other industries have faced this before and the common response has been to bring automation to the process. As demonstrated across a range of industries, benefits of automation include reduced operating costs, reduced manual errors, improved efficiency, faster production times and better customer service.
While interest in automating fiber interconnects at data centers has been around for a decade or more, prior approaches to automation could not meet the challenges. As discussed in a prior blog post (RobUST Design for Automating Interconnects in Data Centers — Telescent) any new automation technology should meet the latching and low-loss performance of existing manual patch panels as well as offering a way to easily scale from a few hundred to thousands of interconnections. And while there will be a slightly increased capital expense for automation, there should be a cost-efficient method to introduce and scale the automation process in an “on-demand” manner.
Telescent has developed a robotic patch panel that can address the requirements for automating data center interconnects. The Telescent system is purely fiber-based, offering low loss and a latching design that matches manual patch panel performance. When an add, move or drop is requested, the Telescent robot grabs the end of the fiber and weaves it around the other fibers in the system to the requested port. A key advance in the Telescent system is an algorithm that the robot uses to weave around the other fibers while avoiding any blocking or knotting. This preserves the ability of the system to make any connection request (i.e. non-blocking) while scaling to over 1,000 ports per system. Test equipment such as power meters and OTDRs can be included with the Telescent system to allow monitoring of any fiber when requested. The Telescent system also meets the reliability requirements for data centers and has passed NEBS Level 3 certification as well as multiple customer trials and has over 1 billion port hours in operation.
With the Telescent robotic system, a multi-tenant data center operator can get people out of the process and remove the labor cost concern for interconnects. Since manual errors are the leading cause of downtime in data centers, automation will also improve the performance of data centers. The process can be sped up considerably, with SLAs for cross connect implementation being reduced from days to hours. With the power meter and optional OTDR test equipment included with the Telescent system, troubleshooting and diagnosis can be considerably improved during any link failures. As seen with other industries, automation of the interconnect in data centers leads to reduced costs, reduced manual errors and improved customer service.
While the above has focused on the benefits of automation of interconnects in multi-tenant data center meet-me-rooms, the Equinix price increase notice also mentioned Smart Hands. This is where Equinix personnel enter customer cages to perform services such as server access and troubleshooting. In multiple discussions with enterprises, they have expressed a preference to control their own equipment and are reluctant to allows Smart Hands or other third-party personnel into their areas. However, due to the challenge of having personnel at all locations, Smart Hands has been needed. But now with the Telescent robotic system, enterprises can purchase their own robotic system for their cage and have remote operation of their equipment. Here again, keeping people out of the process can improve the service and avoid manual errors.
While Equinix noted the rising cost of labor in their recent price increase announcement, the Telescent robotic patch panel allows data center operators to remove the people and improve the process. Contact Telescent today to learn how to bring automation to your data centers.