In recent years, with the rapid growth of the global data business, the network architecture of many traditional data centers can not fully meet the requirements of various data centers. In order to solve the contradiction between the growth of data traffic and the speed of infrastructure construction, cloud computing data centers with a large number of computing resources have been widely used and will become an important development direction of data center construction in the future. With the wide application of virtualization and other new technologies in the data center, can the copper cabling system meet its requirements for transmission performance?
Cabling System of Traditional Data Center
In the construction of traditional enterprise data centers, the more maintainable EOR (end of row, as shown in the figure below) network architecture is still used. When the server is still connected by Gigabit Ethernet, a large amount of data will be deployed between the horizontal distribution area HDA and the equipment distribution area EDA. Due to the continuous growth of data traffic of new applications, the data center based on EOR architecture will be gradually upgraded to 10 Gigabit. At present, there are mainly two mainstream 10 Gigabit Network Standards: 10GBASE-T based on copper twisted pair and RJ45 equipment interface type, and 10GBASE SR based on 850nm multimode (10 Gigabit) optical cable and LC equipment interface type. 10GBASE-T has a small advantage in the initial cost investment, but the port energy consumption is large, which is about 2 ~ 3 times that of 10GBASE-SR. Due to the attention of the data center on energy consumption, the 10GBASE-T network port based on copper twisted pair does not have much advantage at present and in the future. After the data center is upgraded to 10000 megabytes, the application of copper cable in the data center based on EOR will decrease significantly.
Cabling System of Cloud Computing Data Center
The cabling system of cloud computing data center according to the data forecast of IDC, the data growth rate will reach 48% in 2012, and the global data traffic will increase at a compound annual growth rate of more than 30%, while the construction of data center will increase at a rate of 15% ~ 20% per year, and the speed of infrastructure construction is far from keeping up with the growth rate of data volume. Using cloud computing data centers with more abundant computing resources is the best solution to solve this contradiction. Cloud computing data centers use virtualization technology to double the efficiency of existing server resources.
In order to meet the application of cloud computing data centers based on virtualization technology, the cabling system needs to have the characteristics of low delay, low loss, high bandwidth and high reliability. The network will adopt a more flat two-layer network architecture tor network architecture HDA and EDA under tor architecture have been integrated, and the horizontal part of traditional structured cabling no longer exists. Even if copper ports are adopted, tor architecture uses copper jumper to replace the copper permanent link under traditional EOR architecture, which will also greatly reduce the consumption of copper cables.
Application of Copper Cabling System in Commercial Buildings
In the traditional building wiring project, because the information points in the work area are relatively scattered, even in the floor management room LDF and equipment management room MDF and other areas, the physical space for the wiring system is relatively spacious, and the influencing factors of wiring density do not need to be considered too much when selecting the transmission medium. The wiring cabinets distributed in the management wiring room on each floor also reduce the requirements for refrigeration. The impact of the port energy consumption of network equipment on the building wiring system is lower than that of the data center. In building wiring planning, the project pays more attention to economy, that is, the overall cost investment of project construction. Therefore, the copper twisted pair cabling system with low initial investment cost has an absolute advantage in building cabling.
In the reconstruction project of the wiring system, the compatibility with the original equipment needs to be considered in the design and planning. Considering the specific conditions of the original network equipment, such projects will focus on the solution of 1000BASE-T Gigabit Ethernet to desktop. The device port of Gigabit Ethernet is in terms of energy consumption. There is little difference between copper twisted pair and optical fiber as transmission medium. The energy consumption per port is about 3W.
Without considering the wiring density and port energy consumption, the copper twisted pair with absolute cost advantage will be used as the main transmission medium of 1000BASE-T Ethernet (a small amount of optical cables are used in the data backbone). In the modified building wiring system project, copper twisted pair such as CAT5e and CAT6 will be widely used in the horizontal part, mainly CAT6.
In the new building cabling project, 10GBASE-T based 10GBASE network equipment port has the performance of automatic downward compatibility with 1000BASE-T, 00base-t and other low-speed Ethernet, and compared with the data center, in the building project, most of the current desktop terminal LT equipment adopts RJ45 based copper port, so 10GBASE-T will have absolute advantages in commercial building projects.
Conclusion
According to the above analysis, copper cabling has no application advantages in data center and cloud computing due to its defects in energy consumption, wiring density and delay. However, for building cabling applications that do not require high port energy consumption and wiring density, 10GBASE-T has become the first choice for building cabling applications because of its downward compatible adaptive function and price advantage. QSFPTEK provides 10GBASE-T SFP+ transceivers at very reasonable price, welcome to consult via sales@qsfptek.com.