CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP TE CONNECTIVITY
EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT
GAINING REAL-TIME VISIBILITY INTO THE NETWORK The physical layer, often consisting of many thousands of individual cables and connectors can often remain a ‘blind spot’. Better visibility can reveal vital data that’s the key to the efficiency, reliability and cost effectiveness of a network. MYLARAIAH J.N. Country Technical and Marketing Manager, TE Connectivity Mylaraiah brings 16 years of experience to structured cabling solutions, including practical knowledge in the areas of technology transfer, product engineering, marketing and sales. He’s worked as a consultant and project manager, designing SCS for large premises, campuses, and datacenters.
How do you create infrastructure that responds with agility to rapidly-changing, dynamic business needs? The way forward for manufacturers and designers is to look at designing solutions and using products that will align with virtualization and cloud computing. This will provide the benefits of agility, efficiency and availability while building a more secure environment for cloudbased data. Agility is all about making quick changes in direction, with minimum effort and maximum control. From an infrastructure perspective, this generally involves higher bandwidth applications and higher capacity. Of equal importance is a forward-thinking approach to the initial infrastructure design. CIOs must trust that cloud service providers will deliver services that are always available and, in turn, datacenter providers have to trust that infrastructure service providers will provide the building blocks on which datacenters are built. Infrastructure built on connectivity, that is standards compliant, independently-verified, and from a well-established supplier, is critical to achieve a highly available datacenter. A well thought-out infrastructure design
can reduce both initial capex and ongoing energy consumption. What effects have virtualization and cloud-based services had on the network? Cloud computing presents new opportunities as well as new challenges for IT. Computing services, platforms, software and applications that would traditionally have been located on an organization’s network are migrating to the cloud. Cloud-based services have influenced networks particularly with regard to WAN links to ensure each office has a secure and fast network link to the cloud whether its hosted or private. As more services move to the cloud, the connection and its efficiency needs to increase accordingly, and we have observed increased adoption of clustering of firewalls and network equipment. How can enterprises gain better visibility into their networks, thus getting access to vital information that could result in higher availability? Investment in virtualization and cloud-based services can result in a fluid and less tangible operational environment. However, there’s one element of the network that’s lagged in terms of process automation and network visibility: The physical layer. Often consisting of many thousands of individual cables, connectors and connections, this can remain a ‘blind spot’ that, with better visibility, could reveal vital information that is the key to the efficiency, reliability and cost effectiveness of a network. A managed connectivity solution can utilize software to accurately document physical infrastructure. More organizations are realizing that documenting and controlling the physical layer is vital to providing reliable and highly
available networks. When used in conjunction with automatic infrastructure management hardware, all patching changes are recorded automatically and documentation is always accurate. A powerful network discovery tool can discover all active network devices and document and track this equipment in real time. Can you give us some examples of how some of your smart connectivity solutions can help Indian enterprises? What if you could view your network in real time? At TE, we have the Quareo Managed Connectivity, which delivers fully-automated documentation of the network during various stages of its lifecycle, greatly reducing the cost to manage it, while delivering unprecedented accuracy and automation. This provides high availability through increased automation, improved diagnostics and reduced downtime, while reducing opex through more efficient change management, asset provisioning and utilization. It also results in improved ITIL process through 100 percent accurate real-time physical location information. This can prove invaluable to security and compliance providing full integration of the physical layer with the virtual world within available NMS and DCIM software to enhance visibility and control of the whole network. This interview is brought to you by the IDG Custom Solutions Group in association with