October 2009 Archives

With the rapid growth of IP-based communications across converged buildings and communications, each point of connection across the physical infrastructure is "mission critical."

The U.S. data center industry is in the midst of a major growth period stimulated by increasing demand for data processing and storage. According to an Energy Star report to Congress, during the past five years, increasing demand for computer resources has led to significant growth in the number of data center servers, along with an estimated doubling in the energy used by these servers and the power and cooling infrastructure that supports them.

A key component of Panduit's unified physical infrastructure approach allows for integration and risk management by aligning and balancing critical systems - power, communication, computing, security, and control - throughout the enterprise. Many of the so-called pain points in data centers are a direct result of the current economic climate, with a major focus on energy costs and sustainability.

 

Panduit's vision for a unified physical infrastructure focuses on optimizing power and cooling resources to not only cut costs, but to maximize the potential of a data center's physical footprint in providing additional capabilities without having to invest in additional resources.

 

A key pillar of the company's UPI vision is cost reduction, whereby the scalability of platform capabilities provides cost‐effective growth as business needs change, including future software platform capabilities for power, cooling and space. In addition, it focuses on automated documentation that assists with industry compliance and reporting regulations, eliminating costly and time-consuming manual reports.

 

This comprehensive approach to infrastructure design, deployment and management allows benefits to be realized across the entire enterprise.

 

The company's physical infrastructure management solution gives businesses the ability to: minimize downtime; perform a rapid restoration of failed connections; respond faster to configuration changes; assimilate usage and connectivity data quickly; save costs associated with troubleshooting network connectivity problems; provide accountable records that can be used for regulatory compliance; and cost-effectively grow with the changing needs of the business.

 

A unified approach to physical and logical systems architecture is imperative to pave the way for solutions that address requirements for reduced risk, lower costs, increased agility and enhanced sustainability.

 

To learn more about Panduit's vision for a unified physical infrastructure, read this whitepaper.

As the need to optimize the physical infrastructure through simplification, increased agility and operational efficiency comes into greater focus, it's clear the message for smart data centers and a unified physical infrastructure is resonating with enterprises.

How do you protect your profits when research emerges that what you make or how make your items causes or leads to death and destruction? You lie. Or more accurately you pay or finance others to lie for you.

That's what the tobacco companies did for decades, leading to countless painful deaths and needless suffering not just from lung cancer and emphysema but from fires started by matches and lit smoking materials by promoting a substance that former U.S. Surgeon-General Dr. C. Everett Koop told me in a newspaper interview in 1988 is "more addictive than heroin."

And according to James Hoggan, author of "Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming" (available on Amazon) that's what major industries i.e. the fossil-fuel energy outfits are doing in fighting climate change action. And if his book is to be believed it casts doubt on the validity of the arguments and the basis of them that such man-made destruction is not underway.

Hoggan should know. He is a master of the 'dark arts' i.e. a PR executive (when journalists go to work in PR they are said to have gone 'to the dark side': one ex-scribe told me she handed out Darth Vader dollars when she took a government communications job). He knows how to manipulate the opinions of the public, the media, and public officials. His book reveals the tricks such as by setting up, reports CTV.ca "groups with legitimate-sounding names that are actually funded by industries that would suffer economically by climate change legislation or other efforts to curb global warming. "

"What I would call them is Astroturf groups," Hoggan told Canada AM. "Basically fake grassroots groups of unqualified scientists saying that climate science is questionable."

Hoggan cited in a story carried last week by Canwest News Service a recent letter-writing campaign, supposedly from various seniors and community organizations protesting the potential increase in energy costs from new U.S. climate-change legislation but which in reality was funded by a coal industry association and managed by Bonner and Associates. A Congressional panel has launched an investigation after discovering the letters were not authentic.

"It's not even so much about climate change for me," said Hoggan, who chairs the David Suzuki Foundation and is co-founder of the desmogblog.com climate-change website. "It's more about the deception and the PR. It was just taken too far."

Hoggan himself in his chat with CTV.ca compared the corporate effort to resist climate change action to that of the tobacco industry to resist measures to limit smoking, which used the same instruments. 

"An example of this, Hoggan says, is the Advancement of Sound Science Center, formerly the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition. It was founded in the early 1990s by a public relations firm and funded by tobacco company Philip Morris. 

"The TASSC's job was to discredit research that proved a link between exposure to tobacco smoke and health problems such as cancer and lung disease. 

According to Hoggan, such groups hire scientists who aren't devoted to the issue at hand -- "white coats for hire," as he calls them -- and charge them with sowing the seeds of doubt about the legitimate scientists' findings. 

"The thing that these groups have in common is that they don't have qualified climate scientists doing climate science and they have a tendency to hide their source of funding," Hoggan says. "So my view is, and what we try to argue in this book, is that we should strip these groups of their right to hide their funding, and so people would know who these groups actually represent." 

Hoggan says it's obvious the industry groups have successfully spread their message because media reports legitimize their claims, and because climate change legislation is stalled in both the U.S. and Canada. 

"This is serious. If you look at climate mitigation policy in Canada, we don't have one. Essentially Canadian policy would result in an increase in greenhouse gas emissions," Hoggan said. 

"So these groups have been highly effective at creating public doubt and taking the pressure off politicians to actually really do something about climate change."

However, he told Canwest that he believes the groups trying to confuse the public will wind up paying the price.

"I've been in this business a long time, and I think, ultimately, you get the reputation you deserve," said Hoggan. "Eventually, somebody is going to stumble across the truth and so you better have dealt with it yourself rather than having somebody force you into doing it."

 

 

As today's date centers begin to reach their capacity, migrating to a unified physical infrastructure will bring significant cost-savings, efficiencies and more uptime for customers. In a recent webcast featuring market segment partners Panduit and Cisco, experts delved into the "hot" topic of data center availability and how it correlates with unified physical infrastructure.

 

In order to expand your data center's footprint, there are several different logical and physical elements that tie together to make such a deployment successful. The current trend in data center availability - as explained by Panduit's Marc Naese - is the evolution from 1Gig to 10Gig, and the company is even now starting to tackle requests for 40Gig and 100Gig systems. To echo Naese, understanding what these capacities look like is absolutely critical to understanding your physical infrastructure needs.

 

Alongside the trend for data centers to move from 1Gig to 10Gig, therein lies a tendency toward moving from traditional cabling to preterminated systems (plug and play), which provides the ability to get systems up and running faster, and ultimately reduce the mean time to repair when systems go down. Those are all important when you have an application go down - who has the time to wait two days for such mission-critical systems to be repaired? As performance in terms of speed and technology are catching up, companies have to get in front of their current and future data center needs.

 

As UPI reference designs are deployed, the greatest impact will be optimization, which ultimately results in significant cost-savings and efficiencies from multiple elements across the power communications and security environment. Cloud computing is also having an impact on data center design, which presents yet another invitation for systems to migrate to a fully interconnected infrastructure.

Today's Globe and Mail newspaper has a great article written by Joanna Pachner on videoconferencing as a green technology. The article cites a December, 2008, report on "green IT" from Gartner Inc. points out that in some organizations, such as large global consultancies, business travel can produce nearly 50 per cent of the company's total greenhouse gas emissions. 

The story cited how noted Canadian scientist and environmentalist David Suzuki began substituting videoconferencing for travel when he realized how much emissions he was causing. That a round trip from Toronto, Ontario to London, England "spews a [metric] tonne of carbon into the atmosphere". 

Suzuki has been doing videoconferencing from the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, BC, where he is based. And beginning in December the David Suzuki Foundation, which he formed, will install Cisco's TelePresence that gives high-end 'being there' functionality.
 
"When I saw TelePresence," Suzuki told the newspaper, "the illusion was very real. The people seemed to be right there. Now I turn down 95 per cent of [travel] requests."

Yet while e-footprints coupled with high travel costs plus congestion, security and health concerns have boosted videoconferencing purchases--150,000 to 200,000 videoconference rooms per year-- Gartner analyst Scott Morrison told the paper "business videoconferencing adoption has lagged behind the hype." 

The high-end [high/senior level business travel-competitive] immersive systems like TelePresence are only a niche success, said the analyst. As of the end of 2008, only 2,200 rooms had been installed by clients globally.

"Cost is a major reason. A TelePresence room costs an average of $200,000, but that's just a start. Add dedicated high-end networks needed to transmit the video, plus the ongoing maintenance and services of a technician on call, and companies can expect to pay $600,000 per room over a four-year period, Mr. Morrison estimates."

Another reason is the age-old tech bugaboo of incompatible systems. This is more of an issue with telepresence than with standard if marginally lower quality videoconferencing units. 

Says a special report on videoconferencing that appeared in the July, 2009 issue of Customer Interaction Solutions: "some of these high-end units utilize different codec technology to optimize performance. That means a firm or office with one vendor's telepresence system cannot communicate with another firm or office that uses a competing product without sacrificing performance.

"Some vendors say the lack of standards could hurt the market for telepresence," the story adds. "They liken it to 'going down to the cellphone store and given a choice of a Motorola or a Nokia or an Apple iPhone and being told one of those models can only talk to phones of the same make'. You may not buy one, they say 'because you don't know which ones your friends or colleagues have'. "

Sounds like the videoconferencing suppliers and customers and users need to get reality checks and come somewhere in the acceptable middle, just as what has been happening with cellphones, before this technology can truly take hold as a popular green solution. 

You can go for 'being there' but do you really need all the bells and whistles? Or is there a next-step-down quality level that gives what only videoconferencing can provide but at a lower cost and greater interoperability? 

As a longtime virtual worker I've found that I don't have any need for videoconferencing, but then again I'm a journalist and PR person that works in words: I can flesh out emotions from language. That is part of the answer too; limit videoconferencing to the high-end interactions, use audio/web conferencing for just-the-facts communications. IOW 'is the ability to see the zits and/or unwanted facial hair necessary'?

At the same time the suppliers need to get the message that 'ok, fat profit-per-sale-time is over, let's go for volume.' It is very nice to sell Lincolns but if you want to get the products on the road--and maximize total profits--you need to have and market Tauruses. 

There are signs that this is beginning to happen. The Globe and Mail story said that Cisco's recent purchase of videoconferencing supplier Tandberg is "partly in an effort to beef up its consumer and small-business share of video-conferencing." It also reported that "Hewlett-Packard [makers of the Halo telepresence system], meanwhile, has unveiled SkyRoom, a personal video-conferencing system that an HP executive said would cost less than a plane ticket from San Francisco to Los Angeles."

The story reports that Gartner analyst Morrison increasingly sees firms making videoconferences an option within their travel-booking systems, with staff having to justify why a trip is necessary. That is music to the ears of environmentalist Suzuki.

"We haven't yet made that adjustment," he [Suzuki] says, "to looking at having people fly [to meet with you] as a luxury." But, he thinks, in time we'll be forced to."
 

Whether or not they have implemented let alone realized it yet, enterprises today are in need of flexible, end-to-end solutions for their physical infrastructure in order to drive operational and financial advantages that allow companies to mitigate risk while heightening business agility. That may sound like a lot to swallow, but looking at long-term needs and implementing solutions now will allow companies to remain competitive in the next economy and beyond.

 

At first glance, one might think that Panduit is solely a huge manufacturer of the kind of hardware found in data centers and the network itself: cables, connectors, cabinets, racks, etc. In actuality, Panduit is also a developer and provider of industry-leading solutions that help customers optimize their physical infrastructure.  The company's UPI-based solutions can help customer's reduce the carbon footprint of their data centers and intelligent buildings and optimize energy use and maximize resource efficiency across all operations.

 

In a recent interview with Panduit's Anil Maheshwari, he explained how the company's UPI vision is taking hold through a global commitment to helping customers meet their sustainability goals.

 

"Global footprint is a term we are using to refer to both our operational sustainability initiatives as well as UPI-based solutions that help customer's meet their sustainability goals," said Maheshwari, director of integrated marketing communications for Panduit. "Panduit has conducted numerous global road shows, seminars and webinars to explain to customers and partners the benefits of a UPI approach. We are enabling our partners through training to show how they can offer more value to the end customer and differentiation through UPI-based solution approach. The analyst community has also taken notice and we are working to deepen their understanding of the UPI vision."

 

Taking a holistic approach, Panduit is unique in that it will run all global business on one software platform out of a single data center, supported by Panduit's unified physical infrastructure solutions to optimize energy use and maximize resource efficiency across all operations. For businesses today, agility and performance are two pivotal factors that decide whether you will sink or swim. To remain competitive and ultimately succeed in an environment that demands faster, stronger service and performance within the data center, enterprises must be forward-thinking and harmonize their overall goals. It will determine whether you make it upstream and propel your company forward, or go under when the tides change.

Jeff Wiener's excellent The TelecomBlog.com contains a prescient entry discussing and a pic showing old Nortel phones going into an Avaya box. Prescient in that Avaya is awaiting word from the Canadian government whether it can complete its $915 million purchase of Nortel's enterprise division.

Jeff, who writes TMC's The Canadan Angle blog explains that Avaya gives his firm Digitcom, which is based in Toronto, Ontario "some amazing credits for the old Nortel hardware. We pack it up, call Fedex, and say good-bye to our old faithful friend who finds its way to an e-waste processing plant."

Avaya, and other manufacturers, should get ready to expect to receive more Nortel e-waste now that once-vaunted communications equipment maker is being dismembered at the same time more firms are switching to VoIP, softphones, hosted platforms, and smartphones. 

While Avaya will if it is successful continue to support the Nortel lines, and the sets that are out there are for the most part rugged and well made the writing is on the wall for them. 

After all, what is a better time and reason than now to buy or get the budget approval to switch to that new IP phone that you've always wanted? While the economy is still slack, the prices are reasonable, and the sellers are hungry?

The interesting question from an environmental perspective is how much new junk will be produced per employee with these new technologies compared with the old ones. Smartphones are becoming de facto disposable fashion items. The sophisticated headsets you need with softphones last 2 maybe 3 years in unforgiving mobile or contact center environments. In contrast an AT&T/Lucent/Avaya or Nortel set can last 10 to 20 years. 

Perhaps here's the challenge for Avaya: how about coming up with an "e-set" of reused, reusable, low-impact/low-toxic materials, perhaps partner with a headset maker to devise likewise, and make the money off software hosting and upgrades i.e. "appliance-as-a-service"?  And while it is at it come up with the same kinds of guts for smartphones and in doing so lob one at Ericsson, Nokia, RIM et al? 

IOW keep the box, keep the headset, and change the programming. The combination of low prices and e-friendliness would make it worth while in more ways than one to trade in, and recycle a Nortel or another phone system.