According to SeaCom, a company that provides telecommunications to businesses across the African continent via undersea cables and an extensive fiber grid, South Africa is experiencing a data center boom, which is good for the economy. This is due to the fact that local data facilities improve internet speeds and processing power for South African businesses, which logically boosts competitiveness. However, data centers are expensive, so selecting the best transceivers available is critical for the network while also helping an organization’s budget.
“Simply put, data centers provide the compute power to run applications, the storage capabilities to process data, and the networking to connect employees with the resources needed to do their jobs,” explains Brent Wood, Vendor Alliance Manager for South Africa at Exclusive Networks Africa.
ProLabs, a global leader in optical networking solutions, provides optical connectivity solutions to a wide range of industries. It provides solutions for data centers and service providers that are completely form and functionality compatible across 100 OEM manufacturers and more than 20,000 systems and platforms.
Exclusive Networks Africa, the continental arm of this global trusted cybersecurity specialist for digital infrastructure, distributes ProLabs solutions throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.
ProLabs provides guidance on designing an ideal data center transceiver configuration to avoid excessive module costs:
Compatibility is essential: whether compatible or OEM modules, they must be able to communicate seamlessly and instantly within the network. Rather than emulation or batch testing, ProLabs codes and tests all of its optics to the exact specifications of original devices in real switches and routers. As a result, it is able to certify its transceivers as fully interoperable with the OEM switches, which is a critical component for success.
Reduced power consumption for lower operating costs: In addition to cost, the energy efficiency of transceivers must be considered. Although the difference in power consumption is only a few tenths of a watt per unit, it adds up to an exponential difference in daily operating costs. Today’s data centers strive for efficiency metrics ranging from 40% to 70% of the critical load. This means that for every 1 watt of IT critical load, an additional 0.4W to 0.7W is used to cool and maintain the data center. Given these data center economics, lowering the IT load by one watt means lowering the total power load by 1.4 to 1.7 watts, which adds up to significant savings over time. Data center managers can reduce operating costs and their impact on OPEX and CAPEX by using lower power consumption optics.
Save space with higher density optics: When designing a data center, one of the most important factors that IT architects consider is the use of space. Smaller form factor fiber optic transceivers can provide optimized space-saving solutions for a high-density data center.
“The overhead costs involved in owning and operating a data center are high,” Wood advises, “and these include facilities, server technology and its related hardware and software, as well as networking and bandwidth costs, and hiring engineers and technical staff to perform the IT operations role.”
“With up to 70% savings gained by helping to reduce data center power consumption, to saving space with high quality modules, ProLabs OEM compatible optics provide the benefits without compromise.”
