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What's New In Cabling?
April, 2007
The technology and applications
of cabling are always moving quickly - so fast it's hard to keep
track of - but we'll try here on the SCA website. Currently in
standards committees we have augmented Cat 6 cabling moving toward
standardization, multimode fiber testing undergoing scrutiny
to minimize measurement uncertainty and cabling for industrial,
residential and data centers now included.
The two issues we have discussed
before are residential cabling and power. Read More.
- Residential Cabling
- In the fiber optic world, the
big item is "FTTH" or fiber-to-the-home. It's part
of the whole issue of broadband access. FTTH, DSL and cable modems
provide high bandwidth connections to the home, but what happens
inside the home? Is a 5-15 Mb/s connection to the home useful
if computers (and TVs) inside the home can't share it? Home builders
are now getting the word that home buyers want high speed connections
inside the home. Some cities are even writing residential networks
into building codes.
- But not everybody knows the
details. The SCA and FOA (The
Fiber Optic Association) have joined forces to create an
online tutorial on the "inside/outside view" of home
communications. This tutorial will give you an overview of how
the home gets connected to the outside world and how devices
inside the home get connected to the broadband services and each
other. Here's the tutorial
(or click on the drawing on the right).
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- Network Power
- When you think of networks and
"power," you generally think about computing power.
But computing power takes electrical power - a lot of it. The
growth of the Internet, especially now sites are offering TV
and video feeds online, the number of servers required in data
centers is extremely high.
Data
centers use a lot of power. In the US, a researcher for the
Department of Energy at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs (LBL)
estimates it's about as much as the entire state of Mississippi.
This estimate may even be low by a factor of two, since it may
not include all the almost half-million Google servers. Power
consumed by servers doubled between 2000 and 2005 and is still
growing at a similar pace.
Power in the data center is now getting attention. Pacific Gas
and Electric says that data centers consume up to 100 times as
much power per square foot as office space and has encouraged
consolidating servers on new, more power-efficient machines.
Intel has a application note that says that power and AC represent
the second largest cost of ownership of a data center, second
only to IT personnel cost.
- Air conditioning data centers
uses about as much power as the servers themselves. Higher density
servers (called "blades" since they are thin plug-in
modules in tall racks) are taxing power and AC systems, as the
power consumption per square foot has grown from about 25 to
250 watts per square foot in only 10 years. Even construction
costs are growing because of unpredictable future needs for power
and AC in data centers.
Server hardware manufacturers like Intel
and AMD
(who sponsored the LBL survey) are trying to make users aware
of the power and cooling issues for servers, and have focused
their R&D on making servers more efficient. Google is looking
at locating server facilities where power is readily available,
for example along
the Columbia River in Oregon. Where power is limited, like
near Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters, they are looking
to produce 30% of their power by installing 9,000 photovoltaic
solar panels.
- In Japan, NTT has switched to
DC power in server facilities, with power savings of up to 20%
over servers with individual power supplies. Software even seems
to make a difference, as I found one claim that Windows Vista
consumes more power than Windows XP! Even the EPA
is weighing in, working with trade associations to develop metrics
for power efficiency like Gigabits/s/watt for networks and Megaflops/watt
(a "megaflop" is a measure of computer operation speed)
for high performance computers. The "Green
Grid" is an industry group addressing the issues.
We expect power to become a major issue. When our thirst for
data equals the power consumption of 30 MILLION cars already
and is doubling every 5 years, it becomes a major factor in pollution
and global warming.
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