Transforming IT communications can lower your cost base, save your organization in 2020
Fancy Wang
Helping Global Enterprises Optimize Network Performance | Ethernet Card & Switch Solutions
Fancy Wang 1806 2020
The following information is from Wray Varley& Bel Magnetic Solutions N
Who would have thought a virus, an invisible germ, would infect our modern, globalized economy? The current battle plan for the majority of businesses is one of survival – tread water and keep afloat until calm and normalcy return. We’ve survived crises before and we’ll get through this one.
The Congressional Budget Office projected the U.S. GDP will drop 7% and unemployment will triple to 10% in the second quarter. The Economic Policy Institute estimated that the outbreak could permanently eliminate three million jobs by summer. In fact, a number of enterprises–large and small–have already shed workers through layoffs and unpaid furloughs and many in hard-hit industries such as retail have closed their doors. Layoffs, as we know, can be counterproductive once demand rebounds – and it will – when companies find themselves short of key talent. Other companies will seek savings by sidelining important digital transformation projects that were until recently seen as strategic and imperative to future survival.
Rather than foregoing digitization efforts, there is another path to take that can offer cost-savings while supporting digital transformation and improving and supporting the public and the mission of the agency. By squeezing efficiencies from IP and telecom networks, many agencies can realize significant cost savings while continuing to serve the public and the mission of the agency, while embedding into their core operations new capabilities for networking, security and bandwidth. The result is a platform that can handle our current crisis in surging traffic, extra users and upcoming 5G technologies designed to aid sales, marketing and back-office functions. Which seems increasingly important as schools, offices and our government goes online en masse.
Here are some key areas to look for immediate savings while building for the future:
Consolidate: A simple consolidation of telecom resources and vendors can cut communication costs by up to 1/3 for many businesses and can positively impact agency mission budgets. Consolidation can offer a single source for voice, data and more. Companies and government organizations can achieve much lower rates and integrate multiple networks, doing away with complexity and multiple sources of invoicing. A single vendor, armed with leading technologies, especially Software Defined Wide-Area Networks (SD-WAN) and backed by an ecosystem of innovation, both in hardware and software, can deliver a network customized to your organization’s current needs and ready for future growth, especially with the surge in remote users. SD-WAN allows for deployment to remote offices without technical staff. It’s cheaper and more effective than dealing with the cacophony of providers selling piecemeal solutions.
Insight by Dell Technologies and Intel: NOAA, DIA and the Army provide insight into edge computing for agencies in this free webinar.
With federal agencies increasingly deploying mobile technology, it’s prudent to restrict device usage to official business. The concept of software defined mobility (SDM) provides security and compliance at the network level by allowing organizations to block certain web sites and bandwidth-hogging streaming services. This gives the agency the ability to identify individual usage, control, cap and minimize it. Both SD-WAN and SD-M can be used to expand capabilities and lower costs.
D-Day for POTS: Plain Old Telephone (POTS) lines have reached the point of no return … on investment, that is. Major carriers no longer support copper wires, resulting in ever-rising costs to maintain outdated technology. These relics cost agencies unreasonably high monthly rates that will continue to climb year over year, if they are even available. A transformation of phone lines is now possible, including special services, such as fax, alarms, point-of-sale and elevator lines, which used to require an analog dial tone. POTS transformation provides an easy, cost-effective way to complete a digital transformation with plug-and-play simplicity, and realize immediate ROI and savings – up to 25% in most cases.
Managed networks and centralized management create a truly distributed workforce: Increasingly, mobile and remote employees will need more secure and more reliable devices — from smart phones to tablets of all configurations. You can squeeze costs and improve efficiency of these devices by centralizing management, procurement, replacement and invoicing.
FIS, a large financial technology provider, knows how. FIS centralized management for 15,000 mobile lines and devices and pooled its network access across multiple telecom carriers, resulting in more usable data at a much lower cost. Overall, this saved the company more than 20% of their wireless communication expenses.
Choosing the right management platform is another key to enabling the remote tools employees need, as well as provide the security and infrastructure of a normal, in-office operation. It should be able to handle onboarding, billing, ordering and help-desk capabilities among other essential tasks. Savings can be substantial. One client – a large government agency with 690 separate vendors and more than 10,000 separate accounts – saw more than $8 million in savings two years after moving to a centralized management platform, with about $2 million saved just by correcting erroneous billing.
Tune-Up with IoT: Companies and government departments that maintain and manage fleet vehicles, service trucks, tractor trailers and other investments on wheels or on the move through their supply chains, have another avenue towards efficiency and cost-cutting. The rapid digitization of freight and logistic companies has created a new software ecosystem and a new flow of network traffic that enable communication providers to streamline operations, improve service and cut costs for such enterprises. But you don’t have to be in the trucking, logistics or transportation businesses to realize efficiencies and savings from vehicle assets and the drivers that are responsible for them. Indeed, the city of Phoenix, Arizona saw service levels increase, complaints drop and maintenance costs fall on its public works activities when it implemented IoT and fleet management systems in recent years.
Across the U.S. and the globe, healthcare providers and governments are working frantically to resolve this crisis as quickly as possible. Projections range from 60 days to 18 months or longer for a total healthcare resolution. From a government and business perspective, however, the impact is likely to last much longer as we all scramble to improve services, reduce or control costs and enable the remote worker.
But there is relief, not on the horizon, but available today. By digitizing and consolidating IT communications and network operations this year, agencies can achieve efficiencies and maintain and improve service levels. We will learn a great deal from this crisis by developing best practices that will future-proof IT and telecommunications that will evolve into our standard operations in the future. Planning and implementing now with leaner, more resilient and flexible networks and communication systems may well save countless jobs and businesses in 2020 and help support our collective economic recovery, while exceeding the goals of the agency.
NBASE-T Technologies are Changing Enterprise Ethernet Network Topologies
Magnetics play an important role in Ethernet-based local area network (LAN) designs, and especially so as network infrastructure evolves to handle NBASE-T technologies. Integrated connector modules (ICMs) offer ideal solutions for new multi-rate Ethernet LAN device designs.
The continued adoption of powerful mobile devices being fed by cloud-based applications streaming rich content, such as HD video, is putting pressure on existing Ethernet networks. One-gigabit (1Gb/s) Ethernet and the associated Cat5e and Cat6 cabling infrastructures are fast becoming a bottleneck in corporate and home networks, which are struggling to keep pace with rising bandwidth demands.
NBASE-T Technology Increases the Speed of Cat5e/Cat6 Cables to 5Gb/s
Due to the high “rip and replace” costs of installed Cat5e and Cat6 cabling infrastructure, 10GBASE-T technology is currently only economically viable for greenfield developments or refurbishments. The introduction of NBASE-T technology, which can increase network speeds of existing Cat5e/Cat6 cables to up to 5Gb/s at lengths up to 100m, means NBASE-T solutions are being widely deployed to provide content creators, broadband consumers, and others a low-cost path to multigigabit speeds.
Since its development in the early 1970s, Ethernet bandwidth has increased dramatically to support the evolving demands of local area computer networks. From the original 10Mb/s, Ethernet speeds have moved through a series of progressions, including Fast Ethernet at 100Mb/s and Gigabit Ethernet at 1Gb/s or 1000BASE-T. Cabling standards have evolved to support these increasing speeds, evolving from coaxial cables to unshielded twisted pair through to Cat5e and Cat6 cables, which comprise much of the installed cable base in today’s offices and campuses. Modern devices and applications, such as wireless access points and servers, along with the explosive growth of video content and cloud applications, are demanding more bandwidth than the 1Gb/s supported by 1000BASE-T.
The 10GBASE-T or 10-gigabit Ethernet standard was defined in the IEEE 802.3ae-2002 standard to specify the networking technologies required to support transmission of Ethernet frames at rates up to 10Gb/s. The roll-out of 10GBASE-T has been more gradual than previous revisions of Ethernet, partially due to the relatively high costs per port of the new technology but mainly because Cat5e/6 cable infrastructure can’t fully support the standard. 10GBASE-T requires an upgraded cable standard — Cat6a — which means that companies would be looking at significant costs to replace existing cable infrastructure.
NBASE-T Alliance Formed in 2014
To address this issue, a number of industry players, including Cisco, Aquantia, NXP, and Intel, formed the NBASE-T alliance in 2014 to introduce specifications for two intermediate transmission speeds: 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T. The NBASE-T specifications were ratified by the IEEE and released in a new standard, IEEE 802.3bz. The NBASE-T specification includes a downshifting feature, which allows devices to maximize the link speed in real time by stepping down from the ideal link speed of 10G to 5G or 2.5G when the noise in the system is too great. N-BASE-T devices can auto-negotiate to find the best speed for the network, either the NBASE-T rates, slower 100Mb/s and 1Gb/s, or even 10Gb/s if the infrastructure allows.
NBASE-T Supports Power-over-Ethernet
NBASE-T also supports Power-over-Ethernet (PoE), which is fundamental in enterprise deployments, as well as large-building infrastructures, such as airports, shopping malls, and stadiums. All PoE standards are covered and the technology also compensates for the variety of different power spectrums that can be encountered by a device due to varying link speeds within the same cable bundle.
This new standard enables businesses to leverage existing cable investments; Cat5e and Cat6 installations can continue to be used by replacing the devices on either end of the cables, with new ones conforming to the IEEE 802.3bz standard.
Devices connecting to Ethernet cables within homes, offices, and campuses include Ethernet switches, wireless access points, base stations, and security cameras. These devices will include a PHY, a component that implements the Ethernet physical layer portion of the various Ethernet standards: 10GBASE-T, NBASE-T, 1000BASE-T, 100BASE- TX, and 10BASE-T. A block diagram of a typical PHY is illustrated in Figure 1, which shows a device based on the DP83822 10/100 Ethernet PHY transceiver chip by Texas Instruments. The majority of the functionality of the PHY device is digital, with the exception of the “magnetics,” an analogue circuit designed to meet the electrical interfacing requirements of the IEEE 802.3 10/100/1000BASE-T specifications. Magnetics address the key electrical interfacing requirements, including electrical isolation, signal balancing, common-mode rejection, impedance matching, and EMC improvement, and, as such, are critical to the operation of the PHY.
Integrated connector modules (ICMs) incorporate all of the circuitry for the magnetics within a single connector, thereby saving space on the PHY board and avoiding mixing digital and analogue circuitry on the same chip. Transmission speeds of up to 10Gb/s highlight any design flaws or physical imperfections, such as board layout issues and differential pair mismatches, which may lead to electromagnetic interference (EMI) and cause a module to fail electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) requirements.
ICM Critical to Controlling EMI Emission and Susceptibility
In this environment, ICMs are a critical component, as choosing the right LAN magnetic components with proper performance and good EMI suppression is key to controlling EMI emission and susceptibility. As transmission speeds have continued to increase, LAN magnetics have become increasingly complex, so LAN system designers need to choose the right magnetics solutions from well-known magnetics manufacturers.
Existing Cat5e and Cat6 cabling installations are being upgraded to take advantage of the higher speeds afforded by the new NBASE-T specifications. End devices such as switches and network access points (NAPs) are being replaced with NBASE-T equivalents in order to extend the working life of the in-building cabling.
At the faster speeds of NBASE-T, LAN systems are more susceptible to EMI and good design is key to ensuring system performance. LAN magnetics are a critical component when designing out EMI and designers should ensure that they choose a quality ICM from an experienced supplier.