Network Appliance: Fiber Runs Horizontal

 Network Appliance has a state-of-the art R&D lab in Bangalore with around 5,000 equipments of various platforms housed in about 200 racks. One of the NetApp's key priorities was to make sure that the technology must also be future proof and should have a life of around six to eight years without many challenges.

Challenges

One of the key challenges that the company faced when planning the IT infrastructure of the R&D lab was the choice of cabling technology and solution.

Passive networking was the main challenge. Networking 200 racks with copper cables will be unmanageable and will occupy a lot of space. The company decided to go with the model where fibers run horizontal and copper runs vertical. However, it was not easy to move to fiber inter rack connect from a 100% copper environment. The other key challenge was that the company was looking for a solution that can scale to 10G when there was a need.

Solution

After evaluating different fiber options, Network Appliance decided to go for pre-terminated fiber solution from Panduit. The solution allowed Network Appliance to move fiber jack panels anywhere. One of the bottlenecks the company encountered was testing network speed evaluating 10G deployment, as it had problem with the Db loss.

Benefits

Pre-terminated fiber solution enabled the company to move the fiber jack panels wherever it wanted to. Bottlenecks in testing speed and problem of Db loss was also taken care of. Scalability to 10G will also be possible, if required in the future.

Source: Panduit