What is the “Cloud” and why do I need Fiber to get there?
Cloud computing is one of the hottest buzzwords in technology. It appears 48 million times on the Internet. But exactly what is cloud computing? In general terms the cloud refers to using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.
According to research by Nasuni, there is over 1 Exabyte of data currently stored in the cloud. Okay if you are not familiar with Exabyte that equates to 1,073,741,824 Gigabytes of data. And this number is growing exponentially every day.
Technology has evolved almost immeasurably in the past several decades. To access the tremendous amounts data we need fiber networks that can carry Terabits—one trillion bits per second. That is an enormous amount of information passing at the speed of light through this one strand of fiber the size of a human hair.
Data centers of the past were copper-based with multiple DS1 and Digital Signal 3 (DS3, 45 Mbits/sec) lines handling the load of servers to an Optical Carrier 3 (OC3, 155 Mbits/sec). This OC3 would connect the servers to the network cloud or outside world. Copper dominated in a data center environment and the only fiber installed was that single line connecting the servers to the network cloud.
Today with applications such as iTunes, Netflix, Hulu and others and cloud computing/hosted servers, backup and storage, Microsoft CRM, hosted private branch exchanges (PBXs), web analysis tools and web hosting are driving enormous growth in data center server deployments. Data centers are offering rates at DS1, DS3, 5 Mbits/sec, 10 Mbits/sec, 20 Mbits/sec and up to an OC3, all connecting to the outside world via 10-Gbit Ethernet or 100-Gbit Ethernet connections from multiple providers. To alleviate risk, the data center architecture is evolving away from the previous copper DS1 and DS3 panels, to fiber panels with multiple connections to the client and to the cloud for redundancy.
As the amount of data in the cloud continues to increase, more data centers will be built, more fiber will be installed and older copper deployments will become new fiber installs. fiber-mart.com was established to help new contractors who are getting into the fiber field succeed. From training your technicians, equipment sales and rental and a sounding board to help you through job opportunities, whatever the job you have, we have the solution.
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