The Ards Borough Council in County Down is one of 26 local authorities in Northern Ireland, administering an area of approximately 140 square miles with a population of 74,000. The Council performs a host of diverse functions, ranging from street cleaning and refuse collection to operating a retail craft outlet and public aquarium.
The council has nine offices within its boundaries including leisure centers, tourist offices and an arts center where employees use data that is stored locally, in addition to accessing centralized applications in the data center such as Lotus Domino and Microsoft SQL over the WAN.
They decided to consolidate servers back to the data center to centralize back up and simplify management. To support the consolidation project, Ards Council selected Expand Networks for its knowledge of WAN optimization and its ability to accelerate all applications.
The Ards Borough Council implemented one Expand 6930 series Accelerator within the main data center environment, and four 4930 series Accelerators for the remote offices of the Council. With minimum impact to the Council's existing networking infrastructure, they say, "the Expand technology is delivering, on average, application and data acceleration of 200 percent, peaking up to 2,000 percent."
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According to a white paper for Panduit, the deployment of Category 6A copper cabling system "has been increasing rapidly as enterprises enable their physical infrastructure with 10 Gb/s capacity to support Smart Data Center server virtualization, I/O consolidation, switch-up links for parallel processing, and convergence of back-bone links applications."
While the use of Category 6A cabling has been growing significantly in High Speed Data Transport systems, as the paper explains, "a number of deployment challenges remain which impede broad acceptance of Category 6A cabling systems."
The paper does a good job identifying and sketching these challenges. They include "larger, heavier cables that are difficult to manage, restrict proper air flow in pathway spaces, and add additional stress to the infrastructure due to their added weight."
End-users also have questions regarding the overall robustness and reliability of Category 6A cabling systems: can these systems provide alien crosstalk performance beyond industry requirements, support both short and long links, be co- mingled with other copper category cables, and support Power over Ethernet applications?
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Alcatel-Lucent and EADS Defense and Security officials say they're "joining forces to develop new public safety technologies by combining the standards in both the land mobile radio and commercial wireless realms into a single joint product."
Industry observer Kevin Fitchard reports that the two companies signed "an agreement of principle" to develop an emergency communications platform "based on long-term evolution and the Project 25 standards, designed to fuel interoperability between disparate local, state and federal agencies."
Alcatel Lucent officials say they will provide the LTE radio access infrastructure, data packet core, service delivery architecture and backhaul elements, Fitchard says, "all based on the 3GPP standards but optimized for the frequencies used by public safety agencies."
This relates to news earlier this year from 3gpp.org that LTE, the fourth-generation mobile wireless technology favored by public safety for a proposed 700 MHz broadband network, was trialed and will be deployed in earnest by the end of this year, citing officials from Verizon Wireless and Alcatel-Lucent at the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials Winter Summit.
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A recent report from research firm Frost & Sullivan, " North American VoIP Access and SIP Trunking Services Markets," finds that the voice over Internet protocol access and session initiation protocol trunking services market, "will continue to build on its 40.1 percent growth in user base and 22.3 percent growth in revenues in 2009."
Frost & Sullivan analysts found that enterprises are looking for alternatives to their legacy time division multiplexing-based communication infrastructure.
"Intense market competition and the resulting price pressures, at least at the lower end of the market, are likely to keep the subscriber base growing at a faster rate than revenues, translating to lower margins for the providers," the researchers found.
Last month, TMC's Mimi Swamy reported that Frost & Sullivan awarded the 2010 Customer Value Enhancement Award to PAETEC Holding for its Voice over IP Access and Session Initiated Protocol Trunking Services.
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