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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 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."