Power-Free NOC Desktops

Power-Free NOC Desktops

Abstract:

Networks have become more universal over the past 20 years, becoming critical to the lives of every day citzens in the Western World. With networks requiring 24x7 uptime and an increasing numer of people depending on it for basi things such as directions to displlaced loved ones, doctors, hospitals - the availability of these networks during times of natural disaster have an ever increasing human element. The ability to make the desktops of staff managing those networks more tolerant to natural disaster becomes very important to increasing uptime of customer networks.

(Cisco Catalyst 4500E 48-Port UPOE)

Network Advances:

Network edge switch providers have been providing power over ethernet for many years, so that wireless access points and phones could be deployed without the need for AC electrical power. With proper power backups to the switch, there was side benefit that wired and wireless networks would remain available, in additon to the traditional high availability of the telephone network.

Network equipment provider, Cisco Corporation releassed a press release, advancing the state of the ever available network:

Cisco Networking Innovation Delivers More Power Over Ethernet to
Unparalleled Range of Enterprise Devices

BT, Oracle, Samsung and Other Devices Supported by Cisco Universal Power Over Ethernet

SAN JOSE, Calif., July 18, 2011 – Furthering its leadership in networking, Cisco today announced the industry's first 60-watt Power over Ethernet capability for one of the most widely deployed enterprise class switches in the industry, the Cisco® Catalyst® 4500E Switch. Powering communications and IT devices via Ethernet cables instead of a main electricity supply

Hybrid 802.11G and 802.11N wireless access points had traditionally staggered under heavy network loads, with the lack of power availale over PoE, when the network vendors implemented the bare-minimum power requirements.

The implications to increased power from the switches is staggering, but the focus of this blog is Network Management.



NOC Implications:

No longer does the NOC need to be deployed with expensive desktops, in addition to expensive servers, expensive network switches, distributed power UPS backups, and central generators. With the movement towards enhanced POE, thin client desktops with integrated telephony can now eliminate the poer backup requirements leading to the NOC desktops.



Ultra-thin Clients like the SunRay from Oracle allow desktop Network Operation personnel to be a available as the networks they must manage. With applications being centralized on servers in a DMZ, merely displaying those results back to SunRay's with ever so slight power requirements, power redundancy requirements merely need to be concentrated in the data center.

The cost of deploying reliable virtual Network Operation Centers had just dropped an order of magnitude. This is just another example of Sun's heritage in the telecommunications field, which Oracle had inherited with it's acquisition.