Is your cabling holding you back from improved performance or throttling your development?  Graeme Stoker, marketing manager EMEA for infrastructure experts Siemon, gives his insight into possible causes and how to make the right choices that will take you faster and further without unacceptable risk

We have all heard of what happened to the man who built his house on sand.  As Matthew 7: 24-27 says “...like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash."

This ancient message is about quality of foundations and their impact on the structures they support. It can be the single biggest mistake that network managers and IT professionals make today – choosing cabling that will underperform, either due to limited capacity or poor quality.  This is indeed foolish if we consider that cabling is arguably the best value part of any network; proportionally it’s the element that costs the least and yet everything else depends upon its performance.  Getting it right must be a ‘no brainer’?  Or so you’d hope.

The problem with cabling is that, like other foundations, it is physically difficult to fix, alter or replace.  It’s not simple like plugging in a new piece of hardware – and so there’s a tendency to live with incumbent systems that have been outgrown merely to avoid the upheaval of improvements.  Obsolete and almost archaic support infrastructure for data centre space is continuing to cause nightmares for DC managers and, as such, there is significant interest in solutions that can alleviate their problems now, such as more efficient equipment and applications such as Virtualization.  These, in turn, are increasing the stresses on the cabling infrastructure and further highlight the importance of a reliable and efficient infrastructure within the DC.

When you do have the opportunity to review and make changes to your cabling infrastructure it’s essential to consider the longer term view appropriate to plan cabling by. What IT support does your business need today but more importantly which applications will need to be supported in future? A typical lifespan for a cabling system should be 10-15 years, so long-range forward thinking is required to get a level of performance that can cope with everything thrown at it in its expected lifetime. 

Importantly, we can apply this long term vision to network cabling investment in terms of return on investment (ROI), if we look at the annualised cost per network outlet over the total cabling life cycle.  Obviously the higher performing options such as category 7/7A and 6A networks will cost more on day one, but if the initial installation cost is spread over 10, 15 or 20 years, the cost per outlet becomes very attractive. 

The key ROI questions are: how much will a LAN upgrade cost; how long will it meet the business IT needs and therefore, what is the annualised cost of the installed network?  It is a common pitfall to base the decision to invest purely on the initial investment size.  Consider instead the installed cost annualised over the cabling lifespan plus the additional business benefit derived from the utilisation afforded by the investment.

With regards to infrastructure for 10Gb/s, end users continue to look towards copper cabling as the most common option for their data centre.  Interestingly, whilst mass market adoption of 10GBASE-T networking is still in its relative infancy, cabling has been on the market to perform to its parameters since 1999 (the TERA interface easily meets the category 7A 1000MHz bandwidth requirements and is well positioned for applications beyond 10GBASE-T).  The manufacturers are well ahead of what will be required and the higher end products such as those that meet category 7/7A are those now proven to produce the best ROI in the longer term, perhaps surprisingly, beating the likes of category 5e.

One major factor that many overlook is the quality of the cabling installation work and the impact that installers can have on the performance of new cabling systems. It may seem crazy to spend time and money on your  essential  network foundation only to neutralize the benefit with  poor quality installation, but poor network performance is often tracked back to a poor install.  The only answer is to take real care when choosing who puts in a new system; take references, check qualifications and look for the manufacturer’s approval or certification.  Indeed it’s worth hearing the manufacturer’s recommendation for installers as it is in their interest to direct you to those that will put their system in well.  Assuming risk mitigation is important to you, then practices including 100% field test validation, zero STAR passes and good quality network commissioning should also be considered within your next project tender.

All too often price can be a misleading factor especially when it is merely the cost for the supply and installation of a system that is considered. Understanding of the true cost of a structured cabling system, over its useful life, needs to be measured and realistically understood.  Pay now, repent later is simply not an option; bad networking decisions can be highly expensive and disruptive to resolve.