Background
With all the churning of capacity augmentations, bandwidth growth, and evolving technologies, it can be a challenge to maintain a network of facilities at their optimum capacity. Various elements such as:
Older technologies, bulky equipment
Failure to clean up old equipment from the racks after an upgrade
Strategically poor positioning of platform specific equipment
But this is not necessarily an issue until capacity is needed. There is a risk of launching an expensive site expansion that could be prevented by optimizing the site.'
Exploration:
The Benchmark:
How can you tell if a site is fully optimize? Design a carefully planned facility with the following characteristics:
Use Strategic platform placement to minimize cabling and losses
Use modern compact technologies
Make the design modular with space, power and cooling for 10 years
Set a fixed comparison parameter to compare existing facilities with
A POD is a modular fully integrated and optimized facility, designed to supply a predefined capacity benchmark.
The Process:
When a facility reaches its capacity limit, prior to launching an expansion project:
Compare the facility’s loading to that of a POD's benchmark.
Establish how many PODs would be required to supply that loading.
If that amount of PODs physically fit in the facility, optimize instead of expand.
The Advantages:
The focus is now on one design, the POD, instead of a diversity of concepts.
The POD design involves input from all affected parties. This greatly minimizes the potential for errors and false expectations.
The Test:
A few projects have already proven that the process of optimizing a facility is less costly than an expansion. Expansion will naturally result in even more disorganized facilities, since they were not planned that way from the beginning. On the other hand, an optimized headend is well organized, has room for expansion and is easy to maintain.
Position:
Always look for the possibility of optimizing a facility instead of launching an expansion project.
Missing Link Technologies
POD, POD Optimization, Optimization, Position Paper