Security Starts with the Connector as Data Center Cabling is Reaching New Dimensions

Authored by Shajan George, Sr Director - Private Networks, R&M India & SAARC

Five thousand FO ports in one cabinet, how can you hope to keep track of everything? Data center cabling is reaching new dimensions. This world can no longer be managed by hand, using a laptop and tables

On the road to 400 Gigabit Ethernet, data centers are making the most of every millimeter. In the computer room, power has to be consolidated. Spine-leaf architectures are gaining ground. Racks need to accommodate more channels, fibers and ports than ever before. Cables with 1,782 or 3,456 fibers are establishing themselves in data centers. The market is now demanding distributors in the Ultra-High Density class. This means that, ideally, more than 5,000 ports can be packed into a rack. In most cases, this potential is not fully exploited. Nevertheless, the question remains: How should data center operators manage the mass of cables, fibers and ports? How can they cope with the increasing complexity of networks with fewer and fewer staff?

What does experience say?

Five everyday experiences underline the drama of these questions:

1. Traditionally, laptops, tables and labels are cost effective tools. This is how the physical network layer, documentation, service and MACs are organized in data centers. Experience shows that errors creep in when things are done by hand. People can forget or misunderstand something. The data becomes obsolete within a few days. The worst consequences: outages, patch errors, malfunctions on customer premises, faulty audits, breaches of compliance. It is no longer economically justifiable to manage networks and connectivity by hand.
2. If someone overstretches a fiber while managing cables in a packed cabinet, attenuation can increase. If dust settles on the contacting surfaces, there are consequences then, too. Individually, there is a small loss of performance in each case. But put them together and the latency of 5G cells, traffic control centers, factories, Internet services and AI applications could increase.
3. How can such performance losses be precisely measured and located with thousands of fibers in a single rack? Packed to the brim with equipment, a long way away from the operator, no technician on site this is the situation at edge data centers
4. How can connectivity be managed and controlled outside at the edge? A study by the Uptime Institute suggests that data center operators could prevent about 75 % of known outages. They would have to improve management, tools and processes and exclude typical homemade errors in cable management and network documentation