When the lights come on - it's always beautiful

The metres of cable are laid, all the connections have been made, the power is ready, but this time it is more important than ever that service must not fail...
Whether your home calls it Christmas, happy holidays, Hanukkah or ‘winterval’, when the decorations go up this month it will likely be you in charge of making sure the lights are all working.  After all, you are the one who knows the most about planning and building cabling systems and then – literally – switching the lights on.

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In this last news round-up of 2011, we endeavour to showcase feats and developments that prove once and for all just how cool networking is.  And you don’t get much cooler than the barren tundra of western Iceland in mid-December, where these pictures show an ex-NATO base being reborn as a state-of-the-art datacentre.

Pushing the definition of cool perhaps, are the international research boffins constantly out-doing each other with supercomputing technology breakthroughs.  After a group in China shunned Intel, AMD and others to create a petaflop supercomputer with their own microprocessors, techies in Barcelona have made one using low-power chips normally found in cellular phones. Meanwhile, geeks in San Diego have unveiled their latest design – called Gordon – as homage to comic-book hero Flash (as in Flash memory – geddit?) Gordon.   Completing this litany of egghead-eccentricity is Intel, who prove that being supremely dense really is an advantage by shrinking a trillion calculations per second machine so it fits into the palm of your hand.

With a reputation for sartorial elegance and an outspoken temperament, CEO Larry Ellison has weighed into the cloud debate with the astonishing claim that Oracle’s cloud offering will be as cheap as open source.  That’s just two years after having dismissed it as ‘marketing hype’...

Back in the real-world, the thorny concern of expensive, finite datacentre space continues to heighten.  New research from Datacenter Dynamics for the DCD London event has found datacentres in the UK cover a total area of three square miles and consume enough energy to power 7.6 million homes.  More research is available as part of the company’s Global Data Center Industry Census 2011.

In this issue we meet Harald Metzinger, a 24 year veteran of Corning Cable Systems’ major industrial site in Hagen, Germany.  An important member of the warehousing team, Harald regularly competes in regional and national Forklift Driving competitions, and has ambitions to one day represent his country in the World Championships.

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As the cabling industry comes to terms with the concept of addressing continual change in the datacentre environment, to avert disaster, we ask: “Is datacentre entropy preventable or inevitable?” Keith Sullivan of Corning debates with "John Doe", the IT director of a major London financial institute who recently built a major EMEA Datacenter in south London, who, for corporate reasons wishes to remain anonymous.

Keith Sullivan
It's part of the natural order of things that systems move from an ordered state to a less ordered one.  Physicists call this 'entropy'.  Cabling systems are not immune, especially in datacentre environments. 

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Around the world with Clear Curve (19 times)

Corning® ClearCurve® multimode optical fibre surpassed another milestone at the end of September, with over 750,000km now sold worldwide; enough to encircle the world nearly 19 times!  A capability to withstand bends down to 7.5 mm radius means ClearCurve can curl around a lot tighter than that...

The EDGE of Glory?

The best datacentre cabling solution available is now even better, with the news of several key enhancements to Pretium EDGE®.

New features like snap-in routing guides, mounting brackets for depth adjustments and a reduced cable leg outer diameter are designed to make installations even faster and more convenient for Pretium EDGE users.  Is this the definition of innovation? We think so... 

Networking with us

Corning has been on the road all October, November and December, hosting our extremely popular Emerging Technology Seminar series.

- In Paris, over 50 delegates joined Corning Cable Systems, plus speakers from Brocade and Schneider to discuss the latest innovations.

- Our seminar in Munich took place with presentations from Corning, Brocade and ITIMCO, followed by a special tour of our venue – the Olympic Stadium!

- Our last ET seminar this year took place in London, with over 120 participants, again featuring a speaker from Brocade, as well as special guests from Corning Optical Fibre in the US. Watch Here >

Did you catch Corning at the two-day Datacentre Dynamics event in London?  To those who did, we will announce the winner of our iPad prize draw competition soon.

Six customer days have also taken place throughout Germany, bringing together 150 datacentre and LAN networking professionals to explore new developments in fibre and copper cabling systems.  Many thanks to all who attended, plus our guest speakers from Fluke, Wagner Group, Brocade and Rittal.

Access our regularly updated events schedule for more details of what Corning Cable Systems has planned in EMEA for 2012.

Preview: New CCH, LANC & LANS products in early 2012

Behind the scenes something big is going on as Corning prepares to launch a full set of new fibre optic hardware for LAN environments at the beginning of next year. From offices to campuses, the new panels and housings promise even better ease of installation, flexibility and density.  Keep your eyes open for more information from us in early 2012.

Merry Christmas and best wishes for a Happy New Year

From all at Corning Cable Systems, we want to wish all our customers and business partners all the best wishes of the season, and look forward to sharing a happy and prosperous 2012.

In a parallel universe somewhat like our own, Donald Duct is the permanently bemused Managing Director of The Cable Stable, a pan-European supplier of structured cabling, door fixings and hot beverage vending machine solutions for the enterprise IT market.  Cautionary tales from Donald’s true-to-life online diary are reproduced by kind permission, and are not endorsed by anyone of sane mind.

Manufacturers are a quirky bunch.  We had this guy come in, talking about cabling standards and attenuation, and then reverse polarity and something about cryogenic freezing of body parts in liquid nitrogen (in truth, I was sitting a bit close to a tub of polymer and slept for most of it).  When I wake up, he’s talking about ’metallic paths’.  That’s right - paths made out of metal!

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