Unified and Healthy

New technologies in structured cabling allow you to have one unified insrastructure and even keep a tab on their health

Friday, May 01, 2009

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Deploying structured cabling is not only about buying UTP cables and laying them across the building. There's much more to it than that. The biggest challenge is not deciding whether you need fibre or copper, rather it's about how you can manage the web of bulk fibre and copper spanning your network. In this buying guide, we are going to talk not only about how you can choose between different cable types, but we will cover some new and smarter ways of structured cabling, and will also look into some software that can help you keep your cabling healthy.

Intelligent Cabling
Till recently, there was no specific way to figure out a broken link on a near real-time basis. With the advent of Intelligent cabling, this problem seems to be getting resolved. In an intelligent network setup, the systems can automatically find out devices connected with the physical layer and can link them with connectivity changes, and also track device locations. Essentially in an intelligent cabling setup, the specialized ports, patch panels and outlets work like sensors and can be managed through a software over SNMP or some other similar protocol. So in an intelligent cabling setup, you are essentially SNMP enabling the physical layer devices. With intelligent cabling, a person can get a logical view of the entire network.

Such cabling also enables automated and secure documentation of the network layer. It provides security as it can identify unauthorized modifications on a realtime basis and can generate alerts automatically. Some prominent players in intelligent cabling in India are Digi-Link (through RiT), Panduit, Tyco, etc.

Unified Cabling
There is a general tendency in the industry to have separate structured cabling for different types of networks. We want to have a separate network (mostly FO) for our storage networks, an Ethernet 10G network for server to server connectivity, and a separate network for RealTime protocols which are used for communication (Audio and Video) over IP.

This might be good for getting better performance but is quite expensive. That's why the industry is talking about migrating to an infrastructure which has a single cabling architecture running throughout the entire building. The approach is actually pretty simple. While constructing the entire building you go with the best possible cable selection, let's say Cat 6A for that matter. Now achieveing speed from 10Mbps to 10Gbps is in your limits. All you need to do is deploy the right terminating device at the end and you get the required speed for that device. For the converging communication media which uses real time protocols, you can get smart switching devices which are available from all renowned network device vendors, and can differentiate between normal packets and RTP packets and set the priority based on it. This helps in making the communication experience better.

Cable inventory management
Sounds interesting, right? We might not realize but the fact is when there is a problem we spend a lot of time in finding the problem and then fixing it. This simply causes wastage of time and resources.

We can maintain a record of the equipment, cables, pathways, and asset information for the cable plant, and define the connectivity and circuit routes. And using that information to plan and manage the moves, adds, and changes will be a great time and resource safer for us. We found a similar tool which lets you do that. It is called UltiCAM. You can get the software from http://www.ulticam.com/.

UltiCAM is a software which can simplify the regular task of maintaining and managing the physical layer details for any network. This software can record the structure connectivity for any type of inside or outside cable plant including horizontal and backbone cables (copper or fibre), structured cabling, hardware, assets, pathways, locations, and users.

The management of information stored in UltiCAM can be updated by revisions and additions of the layout. Let's say, if a patch panel connection is changed, then the circuit and related equipment and cable connections are immediately updated in the system. UltiCAM can display the circuit information in graphic schematics. These schematics are detailed representations and are automatically generated by UltiCAM.

LANSurveyor
It won't be a real help if you get an alert which says, the Ethernet cable connected to machine 192.168.1.152 has gone bad. The biggest problem which admin faces while trouble shooting cabling errors is finding the right cable. If you don't have an intelligent cabling deployed it becomes very difficult to pinpoint the error location. The only thing which can help is an elaborated network diagram or map. But one bigger challenge is awaiting here. Making such a elaborated map is not a kids play and takes a lot of human hours. Secondly, in today's dynamic infrastructure setup, updating this map regularly, for let's say 1000 node network becomes near impossible. Just imagine all your 1000 nodes get a new IP everyday from the DHCP and your network diagram needs updating.

Using this tool, you can keep an eye on all the inventory of your structured cabling and the endpoints connected to it.	Once you scan your network with LANSurveyor, it creates a map of your network with all devices and links.

To make mapping process automated, you have this kind software. It's not a cheap deal. You have to spend some 40,000 INR to get a licensed copy of this application. Once you use it you will start loving it.

This is the only software to my knowledge available today which gives you a true map (even exportable to Visio) of your network including cable links, patch cord details connection specific ports and machines, etc. And the beauty is that, one can set alerts on not only devices such as PCs, switches, routers, etc, but can also set alerts to cable connections connecting two devices.

In case of a cable failure, you will get an error which will not only tell you which IP has got disconnected but will also tell you the port of the switch connection and the machines which were connected through that particular patch cable.

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