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Efficient running of your business depends, to a large extent, on the unseen physical layer running from your employees' desktop to the nerve center–data center. An uninterrupted service and continuous access are critical to the daily operation and productivity of a business.

When employees and customers are unable to access the servers, storage systems, and networking devices that reside in the data center, the entire organization can shut down. Millions of dollars can be lost in a matter of minutes for businesses like banks, airlines, shipping facilities, and online brokerages. Faced with these consequences, IT executives must optimize their data centers, particularly the network infrastructure.

With downtime translating directly into loss of income, data centers must be designed for redundant, fail-safe reliability and availability. Depending on the business, downtime can cost anywhere between $50,000 to over $6 mn per hour. Keeping in mind that 70% of the network downtime can be attributed to physical layer problems, specifically cabling faults, it is paramount that more consideration is given to infrastructure design.

Want to lower your total cost of ownership, support future growth, reduce your risk of downtime, maximize performance, and improve your ability to reconfigure? Then, you need to strategically design your data center from the very beginning. Stick to the following principles of data center design, and you can't go wrong.

Pathways for Reliability
The cabling itself should support current bandwidth needs while enabling anticipated migration to higher network speeds without sacrificing performance. In fact, the data center infrastructure should be designed and implemented to outlast the applications and equipment it supports by at least 10-15 years. Note that most active equipment are replaced every three to five years.

The protection of cabling and connections is a key factor in ensuring data center reliability. Components that maintain proper bend radius throughout cable routing paths are critical to that protection. When cabling is bent beyond its specified minimum bend radius, it can cause transmission failures, and as more cables are added to a routing path, the possibility of bend radius violation increases.

Pathways must maintain proper bend radius at all points where the cable makes a bend-both at initial installation and when cables are accessed or added. The separation of cable types in horizontal pathways, and physical protection of both cable and connections should be implemented to prevent possible damage.

Cable Management
The infrastructure should be designed as a highly reliable and flexible utility to accommodate disaster recovery, upgrades, and modifications. Manageability starts with strategic, unified cable management that keeps cabling and connections properly stored and organized, easy to locate and access, and simple to reconfigure.

Cable routing paths must be clearly defined and intuitive to follow while enabling easy deployment, separation, access, reduced congestion, and room for growth. This is especially important in data centers with large volumes of cables. Cables managed in this manner improve network reliability by reducing the possibility of cable damage, bend radius violations, and the time required for identifying, routing, and rerouting cables.

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