Network Infrastructure Blog

We are pleased to announce that all Siemon solid shielded category 6A and 7A cables sold worldwide are qualified for mechanical reliability in high temperature environments up to 75° C.

• This is one of the many benefits of Siemon shielded cabling – learn more in the Shielded Copper Cabling Learning Center.

This higher temperature rating is especially critical for support of the IEEE 802.3 PoE Plus (Type 2) application that exhibit a temperature rise within bundled cable configurations. For cabling infrastructure expected to support power delivery to data terminal equipment, the practice recommended by industry standards is to not install 60° C rated cables in environments above 50° C.  Siemon shielded category 6A and 7A cables may be installed in environments up to the maximum 60° C specified by TIA and ISO/IEC standards and will not experience mechanical degradation caused by heat build-up inside the cable bundle due to PoE remote power delivery.

For more information on making PoE Plus-ready cabling choices to support reduced current-induced temperature rise and minimize the risk of degraded physical and electrical performance due to elevated temperature, see the white paper “IEEE 802.3at PoE Plus Operating Efficiency: How to Keep a Hot Application Running Cool.”

Furthermore, TIA and ISO/IEC cabling standards require overall channel length to be reduced from 100 meters (i.e. “length de-rating”) to offset additional insertion loss resulting from installation in environments having an ambient temperature greater than 20°C.  Siemon’s shielded category 6A cables require less than half the length de-rating of category 6A UTP cables and Siemon’s fully-shielded category 7A cables do not require any length de-rating to support 10GBASE-T and lower speed applications in environments up to 60° C.

The associated part numbers are listed below by region. Any cables manufactured after June 15th will now include the marking ‘75C’ on the jacket legend:

Learn more about on Siemon shielded cable in the Siemon e-catalog.

Google, IBM, Nvidia, Mellanox and Tyan work together on a new faster and more highly integrated Data Center Environment. Could this be a game changer?

Google alongside IBM, Mellanox Technologies, Nvidia and Tyan Computer are set to form a development group to improve datacentre technology. The alliance called the “OpenPOWER Consortium,” an open development alliance based on IBM’s POWER microprocessor architecture.

The Consortium intends to build advanced server, networking, storage and GPU-acceleration technology aimed at delivering more choice, control and flexibility to developers of next-generation, hyperscale and cloud datacentres.

The move makes POWER hardware and software available to open development for the first time as well as making POWER IP licensable to others, greatly expanding the ecosystem of innovators on the platform. The consortium will offer open-source POWER firmware, the software that controls basic chip functions. By doing this, IBM and the consortium can offer unprecedented customization in creating new styles of server hardware for a variety of computing workloads.

“The founding members of the OpenPOWER Consortium represent the next generation in datacentre innovation,” said Steve Mills, senior vice president, and group executive, IBM Software & Systems. “Combining our talents and assets around the POWER architecture can greatly increase the rate of innovation throughout the industry. Developers now have access to an expanded and open set of server technologies for the first time. This type of ‘collaborative development’ model will change the way datacentre hardware is designed and deployed.”

As part of their initial collaboration within the consortium, NVIDIA and IBM will work together to integrate the CUDA GPU and POWER ecosystems.

The newly coined term describes a staggering amount of data. The Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.) In the following link you can see Wired magazines look into the NSA data center.

See: Wired Looks at the NSA’s $2 Billion Datacenter in Utah

The storage war is on in the data center.  There are some early adopters of Fibre Channel over Ethernet, but Fibre Channel in native form still holds a commanding lead in the data center.  This is due in large part to existing fibre channel investments and the fact that this equipment is not fully depreciated.  Secondly, Fibre channel is higher speed than FCoE in currently shipping equipment with 16Gb/s versus 10Gb/s respectively.

There is also talk of flattening networks for optimal performance in a FCoE environment.  Flat fabrics will certainly operate faster (wire speed faster to be exact), but may not be feasible for data centers that have recent investments in a more hierarchical layer 3 configuration.

Another hurdle to FCoE adoption is that the current CNAs (Converged Network Adapters) are higher power than the Ethernet and SAN adapters together.  Granted it isn’t by much, but it is still measurable.

When implementing the FCoE protocol, the line between the storage team and network teams dissolve and equipment must be shared between teams.  Administratively, this can create issues with responsibility.

So will FCoE become viable in the near future?  Time will tell.

BICSI NEWS MAGAZINE May/June 2013

The latest edition of BISCI Magazine features a cover story article titled “Cabling Sharing – A Unique, Innovative Category 7A Application” by Bob Carlson, VP of Marketing at Siemon.

Download a PDF of the Cable Sharing article.

The article is about applying standards-based Category 7 and Category 7A in the real world and, as Bob explains, “the benefit of interference-free cable sharing—the practice of running more than one application over different pairs of a twisted-pair copper channel as a means to reduce cost, simplify cable management and converge applications onto a single media type.”

In the article, Bob gives a City of Rock Hill, South Carolina, project as an example of a Category 7A cable sharing application.  The project involved Rock Hill Utilities Department installing 480 category 7A outlets in the administration building, 203 in the shop and 42 in the warehouse.

Category 7A Cable Sharing at the City of Rock Hill

Bob received this feedback from Justin Hobbs, who lead the project, and we are sharing it here with Justin’s permission:

Good Morning Robert!   My name is Justin Hobbs and I have had the pleasure of reading your column in the new edition of Bicsi News Magazine.  As I read the pages, wonderful memories were brought back of the installation mentioned in the article.  I was the PM/Lead Tech for the Cat 7a job for the City of Rock Hill.  I remember seeing the Tera line years ago at a Graybar Shrimparoo and thought “Wow!  Multiple devices on the same cable?  I’ll probably never see this in my lifetime.”  Nothing could have been further from the truth.  I remember when the project was put in my hands, the excitement, the anticipation, and the solid opinion it created between myself and the Siemon Company.  I met with Mrs. Roof and her associates for an initial demonstration and training session by Ron Symolon [Siemon], an old friend who did some training for another project while I was at my former employer.  I was amazed at how this system was designed and was equally confused as to why North America hadn’t adopted such a novel solution sooner.  During the installation process, I was equally privileged to work with Lyle Menard [Siemon] who guided me in the installation of the cabinetry associated with the system.  Needless to say, without further gilding the lily, this project remains as one of the crown jewels in my installation experience.

Justin W. Hobbs
IT Communications
Structured Cabling
CHARLOTTE DOUGLAS INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
Administration – Technical Support