The Backbone of Business Operations

Group Vice President of Global Sales & Marketing for Panduit Corp, Ronald Partridge, reveals the importance of physical infrastructure for business functions.

The physical infrastructure is truly the 'backbone' of business operations. It is comprised of passive and active components, intelligent devices, and hardware and software that are used to connect, manage, and automate five types of systems - power, control, compute, communicate and security.

Without a reliable physical infrastructure, enterprises face the potential of serious risks. For example, cabling problems or security breaches within a physical infrastructure can negatively impact network services levels, which can result in lost customer service and sales, lost employee productivity, and even damage an enterprise's reputation. The cost of this downtime can range from $20 million per year for retail enterprises to more than $200 million per year for financial services firms, according to the North America Cost of Downtime study done by Infonetics Research.

In the future, the challenges around power, cooling, space, transport speed and performance will become more pronounced in the data center and IT enterprise environment. As this occurs the relevance of the physical infrastructure will continue to increase dramatically.

Reliable infrastructure

While having high quality, and highly reliable components is a critical prerequisite, present and future challenges require a unified, integrated approach across all elements of the physical infrastructure. These components, devices and software need to be tightly aligned with the logical systems architecture to provide an integrated solution that optimizes availability and lowers risk and cost.

A second requirement is to take an integrated lifecycle management approach that spans the planning, design, deployment and operations phases of the physical infrastructure. A well-designed infrastructure will be optimized for power and cooling capacity, space, and performance while helping to deliver scalability and security that minimizes network interruptions to enable business continuity.

Thermal management

The deployment of high-density blade servers and storage devices in the data center has resulted in spiraling rates of power consumption and heat generation, presenting new challenges to traditional cooling systems. Effective management of the physical infrastructure can help to manage heat more effectively by optimizing airflow throughout the data center to improve cooling system efficiencies, prevent hot spots, and enhance sustainability.

Hot exhaust from equipment can circulate back to the equipments intake, causing equipment to overheat and potentially fail. Likewise, cool air may bypass the intakes and compromise system efficiency, raising cooling costs. To combat these risks, cabinet systems can integrate cooling conservation techniques such as exhaust fans that move air through the equipment from side to side, vertical exhaust systems that act as chimneys to move hot air up and out, and innovative cable management. There are floor-sealing grommets that lock in the cool air, reducing bypass air by as much as 16 percent. The possibilities are endless.

Savings

We have determined that a well designed physical infrastructure that integrates these kinds of leading solutions can save as much as 25 percent on their energy costs. One area of opportunity is integrating intelligent management of the network's physical infrastructure. This integration offers real-time monitoring and visibility into dense physical infrastructure connectivity across remote locations to identify unauthorized changes or security risks and alert IT managers, deliver guided patching and troubleshooting, and to automate system reporting. As it monitors connections with detailed reporting, it also delivers visibility for improved asset tracking and capacity management, which can contribute to a lower TCO.

To learn more please visit Panduit on our website at www.panduit.com/upi, www.panduit.com/datacenter call on 800-777-3300, or send an email to cs@panduit.com. Panduit welcome the opportunity to discuss these items further to ensure that your readers fully understand the necessity and potential of their physical infrastructure.

BIO

Ronald Partridge is Group Vice President of Global Sales & Marketing for Panduit Corp., where he is responsible for the Global Strategy, Global Marketing, Global Sales, USA Sales, and all international business units of Panduit.