At the IEEE 10 Gigabit Ethernet standard working group meeting, this proved to be the case when KRONE introduced the industry’s first augmented Category 6 cable.. This cable comprised th
Trang 1PLUS
NEED FOR SPEED
— THE GRID APPLICATION FOR 10 GIGABIT
10 GIGABIT COPPER — THE FACTS
MAKING THE IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBLE
Trang 2As the worldwide leader in telecommunications infrastructure, KRONE has a knack for making the impossible, possible At the IEEE 10 Gigabit Ethernet standard working group meeting, this proved to be the case when KRONE introduced the industry’s first augmented Category 6 cable This cable comprised the necessary characteristics to enable 10 Gigabit Ethernet to be implemented over unshielded twisted pair (UTP) to the full 100 metres required for structured cabling systems
I’m pleased to announce that this astounding breakthrough, is now available as a complete end-to-end cabling system appropriately named KRONE CopperTen™, delivering an easier to install and more cost-effective solution than shielded and fibre optic cabling systems, revolutionising the future of networking forever
KRONE CopperTen was successfully launched in Australia at the recent CeBIT exhibition Aimed at providing ICT solutions for tomorrow’s business world, CeBIT was the perfect place to showcase KRONE’s latest innovation, generating a great deal of interest amongst the IT community
Inside this special edition of Network News we provide you with a closer look at KRONE CopperTen and what makes it so revolutionary
On page 6, Glen Johnston’s overview on the evolution of the 10 Gigabit copper phenomenon
dispels the myths currently surrounding this new technology
While on page 8, Peter Meijer takes an in-depth look at the science behind KRONE CopperTen, reviewing the attributes of the world’s first 10GBASE-T UTP cabling system
KRONE understand cabling infrastructure is a long-term investment and now CopperTen provides customers with a truly flexible, future proofed solution On page 4, Rob Milne discusses this from an IT Manager’s perspective, detailing the applications for a 10 Gigabit Ethernet UTP cabling system
We expect KRONE CopperTen to find its first applications in data centres, medical facilities, higher education campuses and enterprises that routinely work with large electronic files requiring increased bandwidth
I’m sure you’ll agree that the advantages of KRONE CopperTen are nothing less than remarkable
It represents the next generation in structured cabling technology and will bring tremendous time and cost savings, as well as increased productivity
to installers and customers alike
Sincerely Craig Jones CEO
GOING THE DISTANCE!
Copper cable and KRONE ingenuity take 10 Gigabit Ethernet to a whole new dimension
Customer Stories
12 Stylish HIGHBAND®
25 Eliminates Security Issues
14 Robust HIGHBAND 25 Powers On
In Remote Mining Network
Product Update
8 Making the Impossible Possible
Business Articles
4 The Need For Speed… The Grid
6 10 Gigabit Copper: The Facts
KRONE News
3 CopperTen
13 Club KRONE Update
16 Environmental High
Editor: Joanna Parsons Art Direction: Nora Collins
Website: www.krone.com.au Email: kronehlp@krone.com.au
CONTENTS
Copyright © 2001 KRONE Australia Holdings Pty Limited
Trang 3CeBIT Australia, the major international
information and communications technology
exhibition in Australia, was recently held at
Darling Harbour from 4 to 6 May
Considered by many as the IT industry’s “One
Stop Shop”, CeBIT provides visitors with the
opportunity to view the latest systems, services
and trends for information technology As such,
it was the perfect platform to launch KRONE’s
latest innovation, with visitors witnessing the
Australian release of the world’s first 10 Gigabit
UTP cabling system Our new end-to-end suite of
cable and connector products aptly titled, KRONE
CopperTen, became the subject of great interest
With the CopperTen solution as the major focus
of our stand this year, KRONE sales executives and
product specialists were kept busy answering
inquiries from visitors keen to learn more about
this revolutionary technology
In fact, I’m pleased to say that the 10 Gigabit
portfolio of products generated a great deal of
discussion As a result, we are expecting to see a
large uptake of this technology in networks being
installed in the near future We anticipate as new
technologies emerge, network users will quickly
realise the benefits provided by KRONE
CopperTen’s advanced infrastructure
Overall it was another successful showing for
KRONE and the CeBIT organisers, with
approximately 500 exhibitors from 15 countries
and more than 25,000 visitors in attendance
during the three days It’s pleasing to note that
this exhibition is continuing to grow from
strength to strength and is now an important part
of the KRONE calendar, providing the ideal opportunity to showcase our latest innovations, like CopperTen, to the marketplace
Thank you to those of you who took the time
to visit the KRONE stand and learn more about our new CopperTen technology For those of you unable to attend, we look forward to seeing you next year
NETWORKnews 3
KRONE launches world first at CeBIT.
By Trevor Kleinert, RCDD, National Sales Manager PremisNET, Manager Fibre Optics Division, KRONE Australia
We anticipate as new technologies
emerge, network users will quickly
realise the benefits provided by
KRONE CopperTen’s advanced
infrastructure.
Cross-section of KRONE CopperTen cable.
Trang 4KRONE’s CopperTen™
announcement for 10 Gigabit, cost effective, connectivity over copper is the catalyst that will enable a whole new generation of IT applications to transform computing and business This will accelerate the adoption of realtime IP based applications to the desktop in terms of both bandwidth and number Applications that have emerged in the last couple of years will become commonplace and be entrenched as key enablers of business Just as email has in the past five or so years, the next five years will see VoIP, video, security and distributed computing applications such as SANs, server clusters and grid computing become standard in a modern computing environment
Any organisation considering the cabling of new premises or perhaps the re-cabling of an existing site, should give serious thought to the next generation of IT applications which will be a pre-requisite for business over the next five years Typically cabling plant will be in service in a building for up to 10 years, sometimes longer, the number and nature of IT applications this cable will be required to support will increase and each application employed will also go though a number of generations If a decision on cabling is being made today, then only the fastest performing and highest quality cabling and connectivity should be considered if bottlenecks and restrictions to business processes are not to be encountered down the track
Post Y2K and the dotcom crash, most IT departments are being forced to do more with less, deploying more and sophisticated applications, but with less resources Budgets are tight, resources are thin, and skilled IT resources can be scarce or expensive This has certainly accelerated the use of IP based technologies as a common network infrastructure, for all applications, based on one set of rules, requiring less resources to manage IT departments invest heavily in servers and mainframes
to cater for an ever increasing number of applications, their complexity and intensive resource requirements
Within three to four years these servers become obsolete or lack the necessary computing power as application resource requirements increase relentlessly; then another expensive server investment cycle begins
What organisations need is to break this cycle, they don’t need more expensive CPU processing power, but rather more efficient use of existing CPU processing resource Against this backdrop are today’s powerful desktop PCs which only use 5 to 10 percent of their capacity most of the time
Organisations need a way to tie all of these idle machines together into a pool of potential computing resource, whilst providing secure and reliable access If
an organisation could use all of its desktop PCs idle CPU cycles to run memory- and processor-intensive tasks they could get more work done faster, possibly get to market faster, and at the same time reduce their
IT expenses
The opportunity represented by idle computers has been recognised for some time In 1985, Miron Livny showed that most workstations are often idle, and proposed a system to harness those idle cycles for useful work This branch of distributed computing which brings the power of clustered desktop computers to compute intensive applications is known
as “grid computing” A grid enables the massive integration of computer systems to offer performance unattainable by any single machine by co-ordinating distributed computer resources (desktop PCs, workstations, server blades and SANs) through the use
of smart systems for scheduling and management The integration of these systems will be so transparent that users will no more notice they are on
a network than motorists pay attention to which cylinder is firing at any given moment Analagous to an electricity grid where power grid users have and need
no knowledge as to the source and location of power stations To people logging onto a grid, the system will look like just another set of programs running on their office computers, indeed transparent within an
THE NEED FOR SPEED THE GRID
Applications for 10 Gigabit UTP technology.
By Rob Milne, Business
Development Manager,
KRONE Australia
The grid interconnect will be a key driver for 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking in the horizontal to
the desktop.
Trang 5NETWORKnews 5
application The grid may be a locally established
resource to solve business problems, a database
application perhaps, it may be made up of a number of
grids working jointly across departments, a whole
organisation or perhaps across the country or the world
connected via high speed internet links
Once the realm of scientific, defence and research
organisations, advances in clustered computing power,
faster networks, and shared storage are placing the
benefits of grid computing within reach of even the
most cost-conscious businesses today
But this is not some futuristic technology, financial
services firms are using grid computing today to
prepare complex models of individual currencies or
complete portfolios, and get the results quickly enough
to trade based on the model’s predictions Grid
computing is an ideal technology suited to startups
who require massive computing power for low cost
Grid computing was a good choice for start-up
Butterfly.net, developers of a framework for multiplayer
online games Butterfly.net’s CEO David Levine is bullish
on the technology “In five years, I can’t imagine a
company not using a grid,” he says
Mainstream hardware and software vendors are now
shipping products to both enable and take advantage
of grid computing technologies Apple’s Xgrid, Oracle’s
Database 10g, Sun’s N1 Grid Engine technology and
IBM’s zSeries hardware and grid software
tools to name a few
Grid computing is emerging as a viable
technology that businesses can use now
to extract productivity out of IT resources
According to independent market analyst
IDC, grid computing in the manufacturing
sector is projected to be a $2.6 billion
market opportunity by 2006 IDC projects
the total grid opportunity at more than
$13 billion by 2007, a compound annual
growth rate of 83 percent Technology
Review magazine named grid computing
as one of the ten technologies that will
change the world
Reliability and performance are critical
to a grid environment, if the grid doesn’t
perform, then the business case for it
certainly diminishes In a traditional server the “bus” is the interconnect between the CPU, memory, storage and I/O resources This spans distances of millimetres or centimetres on the server’s main circuit boards This is a very reliable, low latency interconnect moving vast amounts of data between the servers core components
in fractions of a second In a local grid or distributed computing environment, where a virtual server is created out of tens, hundreds or thousands of interconnected PCs, SANs and other compute resources, the horizontal interconnect, the passive structured cabling and active network components;
becomes the new server bus Latency, bandwidth and reliability become absolutely critical in this new network environment The grid interconnect will be a key driver for 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking in the horizontal to the desktop
Grid computing will possibly be the killer application for 10 Gigabit networking in the horizontal interconnect and KRONE’s CopperTen solution will be a catalyst to make it mainstream
Grid computing is an ideal technology suited to startups who require massive computing power
for low cost
Grid computing eliminates server redundancy.
Trang 6If we look back over history, there is an observable cycle out of which has grown the dominance of Ethernet - and which causes the ever-present desire of network managers to ‘future proof’
Moore’s law states that computing power doubles every 18 months It does not apply directly to active equipment and cabling, but it is a significant driver
Active equipment roughly follows a four-year lifecycle
Now here lies the difficulty for network managers
Computers are being changed out every two to four years; actives every four years - yet the cabling infrastructure is expected to last 10, 15 perhaps even
20 years
So it’s quite evident that structured cabling capability has to lead active equipment deployment In practice
by between four and six years
ALIEN FORCES
There are two technical problems to be overcome in the move from Gigabit to 10 Gigabit/s One is the much greater insertion loss of twisted pair at 625MHz The other is Alien Crosstalk - signals induced from adjacent cables that cannot readily be cancelled electronically
Developing a cost-effective, practical 10 Gigabit/s system relies heavily on the passive cabling to counteract these two problems
So difficult, in fact, is this task that until November
2003 most people in the cabling industry believed that
an unshielded (UTP) approach was not possible and that shielded cabling was the only solution Indeed, several were proposing to exclude even the possibility
of an unshielded (UTP) cabling solution from the up-coming 10 Gigabit/s Ethernet standard
It was only at the eleventh hour, after some of the fastest and most innovative development ever in the structured cabling sector, KRONE’s laboratories produced a real proof-of-concept copper cable After careful measurement and external validation by one of the active electronics manufacturers - KRONE were able
to demonstrate to the IEEE study group that 10 Gigabit/s over 100 metres of UTP was indeed a practical proposition
SHIELDED OR UNSHIELDED
From the late 80s - perhaps earlier - there has been disagreement in the industry and around the world as
to whether shielded or unshielded cabling solutions are the best, with many companies backing one horse or the other - and then trying to convince the market that theirs’ is the only way
KRONE, on the other hand, as a major global player, has always recognised that both are used in different situations and that whilst STP/FTP might be the solution
of choice in some markets, UTP will be preferred in the majority of the markets
Whilst custom and practice in Germany and central European countries is to use shielded solutions, most of the world is UTP-centric In fact, in 80 percent of the world, the skillbase of network designers and installers
is in unshielded twisted pair technology and systems This is why KRONE worked against almost impossible odds to prove to the industry that a UTP implementation of 10 Gigabit/s was possible Otherwise, over the coming years, the industry would have found a situation where every installer would have had to be re-trained and up-skilled to be able to undertake the more complex, and far less forgiving task
of installing shielded systems This in turn would have
10 GIGABIT/S COPPER: THE FACTS
Dispelling the myths surrounding the new 10 Gigabit UTP phenomenon.
By Glen Johnston,
Manager Marketing and
Product Development,
KRONE Australia
Generally the structured cabling solution is needed
four to six years before the relevant Ethernet
ports are installed in bulk.
Trang 7added three extra cost elements into the 10 Gigabit/s
solution - the higher cost of screened cables, the higher
labour costs of slower installation and the on-cost of
installer re-training
But let’s be clear KRONE is not saying that UTP is the
only solution We always develop shielded solutions so
that KRONE users worldwide have choice
PROPHETS OF DOOM
Already there are prophets of doom claiming that
KRONE is being premature, signalling the launch
of a 10 Gigabit copper cable before there is even
a draft standard
Let’s take a reality check from history
In the late 80s IBM Type 1 shielded cable and
10BASE-2 and 10BASE-5 co-ax users migrated in their
droves to UTP In fact, some 30 percent of the market
had chosen to install UTP before there was a UTP
standard
A little later - even though a standard (10BASE-T4)
existed to carry 100 Mbit/s Ethernet over Category 3
-users saw that there was a new emerging technology
now called “old Category 5” Despite the fact that the
cable was 30 to 40 percent more expensive, large
numbers of users chose to install it because they
recognised that Category 3 would go no further
Did the market wait for a ratified international
Category 5 standard? Of course not By 1999, 40
percent of the market was buying the new
“pre-standard” Category 5 cables (Category 5e in North
America) and 20 percent of switch ports were
Gigabit
The cycle continues with Category 6 - which the
world has been installing for the last four or five years
Yet there was no ratified standard until 2002
CAN’T WAIT WON’T WAIT
Network managers now know that 10 Gigabit/s
Ethernet is happening They can expect to see cabling
systems this year that will support a 10 Gigabit/s 100
metre copper channel And in 2005 it is already
estimated that 7 percent of switch ports will ship as 10 Gigabit/s Ethernet By 2007 we can expect to see a large proportion of cabling installs being copper and 20 percent of switched ports being 10 Gigabit/s
If they don’t need to deploy a new network or extend their existing one, there’s a lot to be said for waiting But in reality few network managers have static networks
EARLY ADOPTER RISK
As ever, being an early adopter is not without risk For example, a number of other cable and connector manufacturers have been promoting “Category 6e” products that have focused on improving the internal electrical performance of cables and connectors As it turns out, these “improvements” have proved to be exactly the opposite when it comes to alien crosstalk -the killer factor for 10 Gigabit/s Instead, “augmented Category 6” - on which the KRONE copper solution is based - is the current clear favourite
THE BOTTOM LINE
10 Gigabit/s Ethernet over twisted pair copper is certain
to become a standard A structured cabling solution is needed Generally the structured cabling solution is needed four to six years before the relevant Ethernet ports are installed in bulk
Network managers need workable solutions as early
as possible Many cannot afford to wait for ratified standards KRONE’s copper solution will offer users the latest technology based on the latest information It outperforms the requirements of all the Ethernet solutions currently being studied
There is always a risk in deploying a pre-standard solution
Often there is a bigger risk in not trying to future-proof a network installation
Ultimately KRONE believes that customers should be offered choices and the best possible information to help them make an educated decision based on their individual circumstances and aspirations
Trang 8For years, copper UTP solutions have been the preferred medium over which most Local Area Networks communicate And in this same period, a debate has raged as to when fibre would displace copper as the preferred infrastructure Several years ago Gigabit Ethernet seemed like a pipe dream, yet today Gigabit switch port sales have overtaken 10/100BaseT of old
Fibre, has for years, led the Ethernet industry forward
in port speed progression So if fibre is one step ahead, doesn’t it replace copper? The answer is quite simple
To convert electrons to photons and then back to electrons adds cost (from an active hardware perspective) This makes the cost of fibre optic active hardware as much as six times more expensive per port today than the equivalent speed copper UTP solution
on Gigabit Ethernet switch ports
With Ethernet now the winner of the horizontal desktop LAN protocol war, a pattern has arisen with regards to transportation speeds Migration from 10BaseT to 100BaseT and now Gigabit Ethernet (1000BaseT), the transportation speed has always progressed tenfold Where we are today, with regards
to protocol advancement, is no different
Ten Gigabit Ethernet is alive and breathing today in the form of fibre optics The year 2003, particularly the last quarter, was pivotal in the old question of “when will copper reach its limit”? By the title of this paper you might surmise, once again, someone has figured out a way to produce a copper networking solution to support 10 Gigabit
The cabling industry and TIA/EIA don’t drive the electrical parameters needed to run transmission protocols It is the IEEE who develops proposed protocols, understands what is needed from an electrical standpoint and then gives the cabling standards bodies responsibility of developing measurable parameters for cable (with the possible exception of Category 6 – See “The Future of UTP” for
a better understanding) This was no exception for 10 Gigabit Ethernet An IEEE 802.3 study group was formed to discuss how best to approach running 10 Gigabit transmission over a copper infrastructure This group is composed of representatives from several
different aspects of the networking community, such as chip manufacturers, hardware manufacturers and cabling/connectivity manufacturers
The 10GBaseT working group discussions include which protocol encoding will be used, how it relates to the needed bandwidth from the cabling infrastructure (what the frequency range is) and what measurement
of Shannon’s Capacity is needed to support them
A definition of Shannon’s law is given below The value for the capacity is measured in bits per second
To achieve 10Gbps of transmission, a Shannon’s capacity of >18Gbps is required from the cabling solution The additional capacity over the desired data rate is due to the amount of bandwidth used within the active hardware noise parameters i.e Jitter, Quantisation, etc
SHANNON’S LAW (CAPACITY)
It is one thing to understand how this law works, but another to meet the much needed channel capacities required to run protocols That being said, the following is the basic formula for understanding how efficiently a cable can transmit data at different rates Concerning a communications channel: the formula that relates bandwidth in Hertz, to information carrying capacity in bits per second Formally:
Q = B log2 (1 + S) Where Q is the information carrying capacity (ICC), B
is the bandwidth and S is the signal-to-noise ratio This expression shows that the ICC is proportional to the bandwidth, but is not identical to it
The frequencies needed to support the different proposed encoding schemes (to achieve a full 10 Gigabits) were now extending out as far as 625MHz It quickly became evident that the signal to noise ratio within a cabling solution could be predicted, and therefore, cancelled out within the active electronics But
a random noise source, Alien Crosstalk, also now existed from outside the cable This noise source would need to
be measured and reduced to achieve the Shannon’s Capacity requirements of the cabling solution
KRONE’s CopperTen™Cabling Solution.
MAKING THE IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBLE
by Peter Meijer, JP BE
MSc, RCDD,
Technical Training
Manager and Industry
Liaison,
KRONE Australia
Trang 9You may be aware of how the industry currently
prevents the effects of crosstalk within cables The pairs
within a single cable are twisted at different rates (as
the different colours in the cable would indicate) These
different rates are used in an effort to minimise the
crosstalk between pairs along parallel runs While this
works well within the cable, it doesn’t do much for
cable-to-cable crosstalk (Alien Crosstalk)
Alien Crosstalk is quite simply the amount of noise
measured on a pair within a cable induced from the
pairs in an adjacent cable This is not only a concern
for different twist lay pairs between cables, but
more so between same twist lay pairs between
adjacent cables
Initial testing on existing Category 6 UTP cable
designs quickly showed that the rationale behind
reducing the impact of crosstalk between pairs, within
a cable, could not support Alien Crosstalk
requirements Twist lay variation and controlled
distances between the pairs have been standard design
practice for achieving Category 6 compliance While
the distance between pairs can be controlled within a
cable jacket, it could not be controlled between same
lay length pairs on adjacent cables
Testing to Shannon’s Capacity on existing Category
6 UTP solutions only yielded results in the 5Gbps
range The results achieved previously did not provide
the needed additional throughput to allow for active
electronic anomalies This was a far cry from the
desired 18Gbps Therefore posing the question: Is
there a UTP solution capable of achieving the needed
Alien Crosstalk requirements or would fibre finally
rule the day? The August 2003 meeting of the
10GBASE-T working group would yield three main
proposals as a result
1 Lower the data rates to 2.5Gbps for Category 6
UTP This would be the first time fibre would not
be matched in speed and that a tenfold increase
in speed would not be achieved
2 Reduce the length of the supported channel
to 55m from the industry standard 100m for
Category 6 UTP This would greatly impact the
flexibility of the cabling plant, considering most
NETWORKnews 9
Figure 1 Example of a centre cable being impacted by the adjacent 6 cables in the bundle.
Figure 3 The star filler used within several Category 6 cable designs increases and controls the distance between pairs.
Figure 2 Example of how cables with same twist lays impact one another.
Figure 4 While the distance between pairs within the same cable is maintained, the distance between same lay lengths on adjacent cables is still compromised.
Trang 10facilities are designed with the 100m distance incorporated into the floor plans
3 Use shielded solutions and abandon UTP as a transport medium for 10 Gigabit This would mean returning to ScTP/FTP type solutions, requiring additional labour, product cost and grounding, as well as space
Category 5e would also be dropped as a proposed transport medium entirely The active hardware and chip manufacturers would now be faced with a lesser solution than the already available fibre optic solution
And, questions would now be raised concerning the value of producing such active hardware to support transmission rates that only increased by 2.5 times, or
if distance limitations of 55m were really worthwhile?
Would the additional cost of installing a shielded solution outweigh the benefits in cost for the active components?
The next meeting of the working group would be pivotal in addressing the above questions UTP could very well have reached its limit
KRONE’S INNOVATION: COPPERTEN™
A momentous challenge was now presented How could a UTP cable achieve the desired Shannon’s Capacity of >18Gbps and maintain the 100m distances
to which the industry has become accustomed while remaining within normal size constraints?
In response to the challenge, KRONE’s research and development team quickly went to work Working within a very short developmental timeframe several innovative ideas were presented, tested and then put into production As a world first, the KRONE R&D team presented a solution to the 10 Gigabit, 100m UTP problem
ADDRESSING PAIR SEPARATION
With standard Category 6 cable construction the pair separation within the cable is counter productive for
pair separation between cables The often-used star filler pushed the pairs within the cable as close to the jacket as possible leaving same pair combinations between cables susceptible to high levels of Alien Crosstalk With KRONE’s new design of CopperTen™
cable, the pairs are now kept apart by creating a higher degree of separation through a unique oblique star filler design Crowned high points are designed into the elliptical filler to push the cables away from one another within the bundle in a spiral helix This is very similar to a rotating cam lobe
Due to the oblique shape of the star, the pairs remain close to the centre, while remaining off-centre as the
cable spirals along its length, creating a random oscillating separation effect The bundled cables now have sufficient separation between same lay length (same colour) pairs to prevent Alien Crosstalk from limiting cable performance
Oblique, elliptical, offset filler, which rotates along its length to create an air gap between the cables within a bundle.