Data

We use the word ‘data’ when we talk about using the internet on your phone. Whenever you use the internet you use data – whether it’s browsing the web, sending an email, or watching a TV programme on BBC iPlayer.

Data is measured in bytes. Bytes are very small and by themselves aren’t large enough to contain much useful information.

To give you an idea of how much data you’re using, watching videos on YouTube or streaming music on Spotify tends to use quite a lot of data. But using Twitter or browsing Facebook and the internet in general uses much less data.

Today’s  rapid rise of mobile devices, BYOD, wireless connectivity, IoT, Big Data, Cloud services and other innovations means the way we work and engage with our work environments is changing rapidly. People working from home, in public spaces or in transit, or people briging their own devices to work, expect hassle-free, high-quality connectivity. This requires bandwidth, increased flexibility and a solid backbone to the Data Center. How do you support the countless people relying on Data Center-based services, improve and innovate security and accommodate fast-moving IT developments and business processes ?

Fiber can help facilities departments

Fiber provides the solution. Until recently, discrete groups of in-building resources were devoted to specific functions: telephony, internet, data, LAN, security, building infrastructure… Today, we’re currently seeing integrated pools of computers, storage and networking resources increasingly being shared across multiple applications, enabled by highly efficient, policy-driven processes. Convergence allows users to make the most of increasingly sophisticated system intelligence, providing enormous technical and business efficiency increases, centralising IT resource management, consolidating systems, boosting resource utilisation rates and lowering costs.

Power over Ethernet (PoE), which combines power and data transmission in a single cable, is facilitated with network convergence, allowing for extensive use of powering devices using data cabling. The original PoE standard was introduced a decade ago and supported up to 12.95 watts, but with the introduction of PoE+ in 2009, up to 25.5 watts is supported. PoE can now power devices over long lengths of data cable.

Network management

A network management system (NMS) is a set of hardware and/or software tools that allow an IT professional to supervise the individual components of a network within a larger network management framework.

Network management system components assist with:

• Network device discovery –  identifying what devices are present on a network.
• Network device monitoring – monitoring at the device level to determine the health of network components and the extent to which their performance matches capacity plans and intra-enterprise service-level agreements (SLAs).
• Network performance analysis –  tracking performance indicators such as bandwidth utilization, packet loss, latency, availability and uptime of routers, switches and  other Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) -enabled devices.
• Intelligent notifications – configurable alerts that will respond to specific network scenarios by paging, emailing, calling or texting a network administrator.