Corning Helps Data Centers Go Green with Fiber

Energy Saving Comparison of 10G Optical vs. 10G Copper

Number of 10G Ports

April 2010
Every time you send an e-mail, pay a bill online, or click onto Facebook, a data center somewhere in the world expends a bit of energy. Zoom out to view the furious pace of collective online activity in the U.S. alone, and you have data center energy usage that equals that of 5 million homes. Corning fiber and cable products are now helping data centers around the world dramatically reduce that energy consumption – saving costs and increasing reliability at the same time.

The time has never been better for Corning to be bringing its green solutions to energy-gobbling data centers. Governmental agencies around the world, like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, are actively looking for ways to set data center efficiency standards.

“Corning’s value proposition is clear,” says Doug Coleman, manager of Technology & Standards for Corning Cable Systems. By using Corning fiber, cable, hardware, and equipment products instead of copper cable, he says, “data centers use less power at both the networking level and cooling level. Because they are using less power, they reduce their carbon footprint and their costs.”

Doug has been a regular speaker at energy and data center industry events over the past year, offering detailed technical data on the advantages fiber brings to the data center environment. Here are just few of his main points:

10-gigabit signals driven through a fiber network require less energy than those same signals would need to be driven over copper wire. For example, in 288 10G circuits, fiber represents an 86-percent energy reduction in network and cooling operations.
The EPA states that each kilowatt of network power in a data center requires a kilowatt of power for the cooling devices. Since fiber uses significantly less network power than copper, it offers drastic reductions in overall power usage and carbon emissions.
Data centers organize telecommunications equipment in large racks. Because fiber offers such high-density hardware and cable capabilities, data centers can get by with far fewer racks. (Fiber also increases rack efficiency by providing a higher number of ports on network electronics.) Typically, a data center could take 25 racks for copper connectivity. Using fiber brings those 25 racks down to five racks. By consolidating rack space, data centers can operate within a smaller real estate footprint, requiring less energy.

The environmental advantages of fiber extend far beyond the data center operations.

Because fiber offers high-density data transmission, data centers can accomplish more with less – with environmentally positive results. For example, a data center manager may want to run 200 feet of 108 circuits at a speed of 10 gigabits. Those fibers would be encased in an optical cable about .7 inches in diameter, and the whole thing would weigh about 45 pounds. To get the same transmission with copper, a data center would have to run 108 individual cables – with each wire encased in its own plastic sheath – for a total weight of about 1,000 pounds. That’s 22 times the weight of the comparable fiber optic cable, requiring much higher energy consumption and freight cost to bring it from a manufacturing facility to the data center.
Industry data indicates that the mining required to provide two kilograms of copper wire (roughly the amount you’d need for a 200-foot length of copper cable) translates into about 1,000 kilograms of environmental impact. The creation of that same length of fiber requires only about .06 of a kilogram of environmental impact.

Corning Cable Systems has a variety of products that are helping data centers move toward greener operations.

“In June of last year, we introduced LANscape® Pretium EDGE^TM Solutions, which are high-density preterminated optical cabling solutions for the data center environment,” Doug said.

One 0.58 inch fiber optic cable can serve the same number of ports as 48 “reduced diameter” CAT 6A cables.

Enabled by Corning’s bend-insensitive ClearCurve® optical fiber technology, the Pretium EDGE Solutions help data centers increase pathway and space density, reduce power consumption, and increase reliability – all with faster overall installation time.

Pretium EDGE Solutions feature preterminated and tested multi-fiber assemblies, or trunks, with a minimum bend radius as small as five times the outer diameter of the cable, compared to 10 times in traditional trunks. Pretium EDGE Solutions trunks are an average of 30 percent smaller than traditional trunks.

The cable routes tightly around corners and bends, and extra slack can coil without causing attenuation that may diminish system performance. Pretium EDGE Solutions interconnect cables offer a minimum bend radius of up to eight times the outer diameter, meaning more cables can be routed and stored in the same amount of space without interfering with initial installation or MACs..

“Data center operators are recognizing that energy-saving strategies with fiber are not only green, but also help them lower costs and improve reliability,” said Doug. “Corning’s solutions are attractive to them because they help them achieve all these objectives. We think we’re just at the beginning of a market trend that will be great for Corning and great for the environment.”

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