Here's this week's VoiceCon eNews: Telecom used to be part of the facilities department. Is it time to put it back there? That might be a little bit of an exaggeration. Maybe it's more accurate to say, You can take Telecom out of Facilities, but you can't take Facilities out of Telecom.
Here's this week's VoiceCon eNews:
Telecom used to be part of the facilities department. Is it time to put it back there?
That might be a little bit of an exaggeration. Maybe it's more accurate to say, You can take Telecom out of Facilities, but you can't take Facilities out of Telecom.We've recently had a lot of great posts discussing various aspects of convergence at Layer 1, from energy costs to cabling (see, for example, Matt Brunk here and Gary Audin here). The common thing they note is that the true commodities--not bits and bytes, but the things that push the bits and bytes out of the boxes and get them to their destination--those commodities are getting more expensive, with no reason to expect a reversal of the trend. So how do you build into your planning a way to use less of them?
For energy (leave aside the social/green aspect, focus on cost), Matt has written about the need for Energy Star standards, like you have for household appliances, for servers and other power-sucking IT gear. And Gary's post cited above discusses protocols for using energy more efficiently in IP phones. Gary has also written about using power costs as a factor in deciding where to site primary and backup datacenters.
Now, that won't always play out ideally. The folks I wrote about last week, the hosting company PosTrack, had to balance the desire to locate where power is cheaper (Joliet, IL, in the exurbs), vs. needing to locate where they could efficiently make high-bandwidth connections to the big fiber backbone they needed to access; this second requirement landed some of their gear in a cage at a Level 3 datacenter high above downtown Chicago, where costs are high.
The issue of site surveying and selection even gets down to the local level; as Matt writes in his post on the "Copper Storm," you may even want to look at configuring your wiring plan and placing closets and IDFs/MDFs in ways that let you use the least amount of expensive copper.
The other solution that Matt addresses is wireless. With the 802.11n standard promising 100+ Mbps bandwidth, this could theoretically be a solution. And you'd think that, even if you weren't comfortable going completely wireless, you might at least consider not cabling certain parts of new facilities, or not upgrading cabling where you otherwise might, especially if you can arrange to have your more mobile workers or office hotelers located in this area. On the other hand, deciding not to cable is a pretty long-term decision, so you'd really want to make sure you're right before you go with it (or go without it, I guess).
Though I wasn't serious at the beginning about putting Telecom back under Facilities, the connection still needs to be made. If you can figure out a way to save facilities costs by the way you configure a deployment, it'd be nice if you could capture that savings for your own budget, and use the funds to pilot higher-layer technologies. However, this would require the financial managers to forgo the short-term facilities savings for the promise of bigger productivity or competitive gains driven by stuff like unified communications. They'd have to buy the idea that UC is worth the cost of deploying.
For that matter, so would you.
