Kevin St Cyr, senior vice president, Enterprise Solutions, CommScope, provides insight into what he expects will be the biggest enterprise network trends in 2014.

As demand for increased bandwidth continues to grow, the chief concern for network IT and data centre managers will be to deploy the right technologies and strategies to handle the pressure on the physical layer to survive and thrive. As this “data deluge” continues into 2015 and beyond, the data centre and enterprise are each facing their own unique set of challenges to keep up with demand.

Early adoption in the data centre
The data centre is often an early adopter of technology because it consumes the most bandwidth. The physical layer and infrastructure must be at the highest level of performance and uptime. As a result, this is what I expect in 2014 and beyond:
•    In most, if not all, data centres we are seeing an increased use of higher-grade multimode optical fibre. 
•    We also continue to see a marked increase in the deployment of pre-terminated fiber and copper cabling. 
•    Server virtualisation has become prevalent in the move towards cloud computing, driving the need for faster server uplinks. 
•    We are witnessing 10GBASE-T finally starting to take hold as transceiver costs and power usage drop, driving the need for Category 6A cabling.

Another important consideration is how copper will fare over time. When the end user wants to have a lower cost data centre, copper solutions continue to fit the bill; however, what will happen when data centers migrate to beyond 40G? This might make the turning point where fiber will be crowned king.

Combating the data crunch 
The amount of intelligence gathered within the data centre is continuing to grow. Harnessing the power of predictive analytics through comprehensive software solutions such as a data center infrastructure management (DCIM) will be critical in helping data centre operators optimise and plan any expansion of their current facility. An ideal DCIM suite will help organizations have deeper insight into how their assets are being used, how much capacity is available for growth and how their systems are interconnected.

Modular data centres are one of the latest innovations that could see substantial growth in 2014. This solution offers the capability of rapid deployment featuring a standard design, tailored to the needs of the customer, within an efficient, modular structure. A substantial market for rapidly deployable data centers is developing in high-tech industries operating in remote areas such as oil and natural gas extraction facilities. We expect demand in this market to continue to develop in 2014 and beyond.

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