on Campus For Tim Deaver, the challenge was finding a horizontal UTP cabling solution that would support both gigabit today and 10 Gbps in the future... A major ob-stacle was that at the
Trang 1igabit to the desk is not just for the engineering students,” says Tim Deaver, manager of tech-nical services for the 300-acre campus shared
by Ohio State University Newark (OSUN) and Central Ohio Technical College (COTC) “Ac-cess to video is an important part of just about every curriculum We have students in digital media design and other fields who require ac-cess to very large files Our goal is for students
to access their applications from anywhere on the campus.”
With plans to grow the student population from 5,000 today to more than 7,500 by 2009, campus officials determined that brick and mor-tar alone would not be the differentiator that would attract students The IT infrastructure supporting the campus was deemed an equally important element to meet enrollment targets With the proper infrastructure in place, the cam-pus could offer students the technical ameni-ties of advanced video applications, virtually non-blocking Internet access and ample storage for data and e-mail
Yet, designing an infrastructure to support gi-gabit to the desktop was complicated by an im-perative to future-proof the wired network As alternatives were considered, fiber to the desk was evaluated, yet only briefly due to the added costs for fiber switches, cables and NICs “Cop-per is still going to be a driving force to the desktop for the future, especially as long as the
“G
C C OVER OVER S S TORY TORY
Ohio institutions implement a 10-Gigabit Ethernet switched-fiber backbone to enable high-speed desktop applications over UTP copper.
on Campus
For Tim Deaver, the challenge was finding a horizontal
UTP cabling solution that would support both gigabit
today and 10 Gbps in the future
Trang 2price for fiber components remains
higher than for copper,” Deaver says
The challenge for Deaver was
find-ing a horizontal UTP cablfind-ing solution
that would support both gigabit today
and 10 Gbps in the future A major
ob-stacle was that at the time Deaver was
considering cabling options, all UTP
solutions could only support a
theoreti-cal 10GBase-T to only 55 meters–not
the required standard of 100 meters for
horizontal cabling systems At 55
meters, more telecommunications
rooms and more Ethernet switches
would be required in each building
For OSUN and COTC to compete
effectively for students, the IT
infra-structure would have to be designed to
support many different and
bandwidth-intensive applications Video on
de-mand would be accessible through
por-tal technology, presenting students with
a dashboard for storage and retrieval of
many types of files A high-speed
infra-structure would also be required to
ex-pand conferencing services, already in
use for nursing and other fields, so that
full motion video could be carried across
the campus or across the state, enabling
teachers to multicast to many
class-rooms at once
A BENEFICIAL ARRANGEMENT The shared arrangement between OSUN and COTC has proven benefi-cial to both colleges, Deaver says While admissions and advising remain sepa-rate, this combined campus affords both organizations the cost efficiency of shar-ing facilities and resources, such as class-rooms, computers and the IT infrastruc-ture In fact, sharing facilities and
resources has allowed more services for students than would have been possible
on separate campuses, even as enroll-ment has grown nearly 40% over the past several years
The creation of an advanced learn-ing environment continues to provide OSUN/COTC a competitive edge over other colleges in the area Aside from
top-notch programs and staff, new fa-cilities will continue to be required to meet enrollment projections Already,
a modern academic building, audito-rium and conference center have been built A new student center and library are also in the project plan
To fully support video and other tech-nical services that would give the schools an edge in student recruitment, the campus network was designed with
a 10-Gigabit Ethernet switched fiber backbone linking all buildings This fi-ber ring would support not only cur-rent and planned applications but also would allow the campus to link with other schools in Ohio and across the nation In Ohio, a dark fiber initiative has already linked the top 20 schools in the state to facilitate research and col-laboration, as well as enable distance learning between Ohio schools With a 10-Gbps fiber backbone in place, design priorities for infrastruc-ture turned to enabling gigabit to the
In the absence of standards for 10-Gigabit Ethernet over UTP, Shannon’s Law provided the guidance needed to find the correct solution.
In the digital media design lab, students and teachers have access to conferencing and collaboration capabilities enabled by the campus’ high-speed connectivity
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Trang 3desktop for every student and faculty
member Standards for 10-Gigabit
Ethernet over UTP, however, were not
in place at that time–and are not ready
today In the absence of such standards,
Deaver and his team were able to select
cabling products using a common
prin-cipal used in the electronics industry
for calculating the capacity required for
communications between devices–
Shannon’s Law
Also known as Shannon’s capacity,
Shannon’s Law is a measure that
de-scribes how efficiently a cable can
trans-mit data at different rates The
Shannon’s table shows values for
capac-ity expressed in bits per second for
vari-ous distances Taking into account the
additional bandwidth required to
over-come noise produced by active
hard-ware, such as jitter, especially
trouble-some in the higher frequencies, a
Shannon’s capacity of 18-Gbps is
re-quired from the cabling infrastructure
to achieve 10-Gbps transmission at 100
meters
THE 100-METER SOLUTION
When Deaver was searching for a
10-Gbps UTP solution in early 2004,
cable manufacturers could not
demon-strate Shannon’s capacity of 18 Gbps at
100 meters, due primarily to alien
crosstalk, which is the amount of noise
measured on a pair within a cable that
is induced from an adjacent cable
Sev-eral vendors could meet the 18-Gbps
requirement, but only at 55 meters
At a time when the OSUN/COTC
staff considered the prospect of
design-ing cable routes and telecom rooms to
accommodate 55 meters, KRONE,
which was acquired by ADC in 2004,
was able to demonstrate Shannon’s
ca-pacity in excess of 18 Gbps over a
100-meter cable with its new
CopperTen cabling Instead of using the
traditional star filler to separate pairs
within a cable, the CopperTen cable
de-sign achieves a higher degree of
separa-tion of adjacent pairs through an
ob-lique star filler design, creating
sufficient separation between the same
color pairs to prevent alien crosstalk
In the absence of standards for
10-Gbps Ethernet over UTP, Shannon’s
Law provided the guidance needed to find the correct solution “Shannon’s capacity really told us what we needed
to watch for, to make sure our network was future-proof,” explains Deaver “We don’t have that future network now
Our idea was to put in the best cabling that we could possibly get so when those 10-gig copper cards come out, we’ll be ready.”
Because ADC’s CopperTen cabling is backwards compatible to the TIA/EIA standards for Category 6 cabling and could demonstrate 18-Gbps transmis-sion over 100 meters, Deaver was able
to have the infrastructure designed for standard 100-meter distances on each floor With long hallways to deal with, all other solutions that could only handle 10-Gbps transmission at 55 meters would have greatly increased the cost of the project, he says
In the Founder’s Building, 110,000 feet of CopperTen cable was installed
so that five telecom rooms could be con-solidated into one If the cabling sys-tem supported 10 Gbps at only 55 meters, the cost for the building infra-structure would have doubled, accord-ing to Deaver “For Founder’s, a 55-meter solution would have required two telecom rooms and two Ethernet switches,” he says, citing the six-figure cost of an Ethernet switch
In addition, Deaver and his team con-tinue to deploy voice over IP (VoIP) where it makes sense to consolidate voice and data traffic While VoIP will probably never require the bandwidth available from a 10-Gbps cabling solu-tion, an infrastructure with fewer telecom rooms will require less active equipment to support VoIP, reducing
capital expenditures for the campus network As with any project, the cost
of active equipment dwarfs the cost of the passive network infrastructure
“If we were to really future-proof the network, we would need a (cabling) sys-tem that would allow us to consolidate our data closets to as few as possible Anything less than 100 meters was go-ing to cost us a lot of money today and
in the long run,” says Deaver
The condition of existing cable paths
in all buildings was not a surprise Years
of growth and change resulted in a spi-der web of cabling, with no apparent thought process given for ongoing man-agement of the infrastructure Once cable and connectors were selected, Deaver and his team relied on Starcomm, the cabling contractor, to design appropriate cable routes for each building
200,000 FEET OF CABLE Starcomm removed most of the old cable and installed new cable trays and ladder racks throughout each building
to create defined cable routes Proper access was provided so that moves, adds and changes in the future would be easier to perform The installation team found no real difference between work-ing with CopperTen and Category 5e
or Category 6 cable
Most significant, however, was the tight installation timeframe that re-quired the majority of the work to be performed during the summer break The installers removed old cable, cre-ated new cable routes, installed about 200,000 feet of cable, and dressed and terminated everything in less than 60 days
With any major project, risk is a con-sideration, especially in the absence of standards to guide infrastructure design and product selection One way risk was reduced was by requiring that the new 10-Gbps cabling system be fully chan-nel and component compliant with Cat-egory 6 Achieving noise and loss char-acteristics that satisfy transmission at both 250 MHz for Category 6 and 625 MHz for 10 Gbps was accomplished with ADC’s CopperTen augmented Category 6 cable
One way risk was reduced was by requiring that the new 10-Gbps cabling system be fully channel and component compliant with Category 6.
Trang 4CopperTen is designed to work on the
upper end of the scales being set by
vari-ous standards working groups Today,
TIA contends 10-Gbps signals should
be sent at 500 MHz, while ISO desires
a higher level, controlling the sweep out
to 625 MHz ADC chose to design
CopperTen for transmission at
625 MHz, so that the cabling system
will be well within specifications once
standards are formally issued for
10-Gbps Ethernet over UTP
What really mitigated the risk of the
project, however, was the warranty, says
Deaver The CopperTen cabling system
was guaranteed for Category 6 channel
and component compliance It was also
guaranteed for 18-Gbps capacity to
en-able 10-Gbps transmission “The
war-ranty made all the difference in the
world when it came to cable selection,”
says Deaver
Investing in an infrastructure that
would support gigabit to the desktop
to-day and someto-day be able to take full
ad-vantage of the 10-Gbps campus
back-bone was for more than just the obvious
cost savings of not having to recable
Reprinted from Communications News, March 2005 Copyright © 2005 by Nelson Publishing Inc • www.comnews.com
buildings when 10-Gbps over UTP be-came a reality Rather, the motivation was all about the students, Deaver offers
“We are committed to providing an
About ADC
Robert Switz
ADC was founded in 1935 and today provides global network infrastructure products and services that enable the delivery of high-speed Internet, data, video and voice services The company has sales in more than 150 countries
With the acquisition of the KRONE Group in 2004, ADC now provides an integrated portfolio of products for enterprise net-works with TrueNet Structured Cabling Solutions TrueNet com-bines cable, connectivity and cable-management solutions for fi-ber, 10-Gigabit Ethernet over UTP copper and Category 6/5e from the data center to the desktop
Industry veteran Robert E Switz is chief executive officer and president of ADC He has played an instrumental role in transforming ADC in recent years, developing and implementing the strategies that are extending the company’s leadership in network infrastructure solutions for all types of networks Switz joined ADC in 1984 and has served as CFO, president of the broadband access and transport business unit, and executive vice president Switz also serves as a director on the boards
of Hickory Tech Corp and Broadcom Corp
For more information from ADC:
www.adc.com
exceptional education experience One way we accomplish that goal is making sure students can take full advantage of the technologies available,” he says
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