4 January 2019
 Categories: , Blog

Developments in IT infrastructure management—cabling and wiring—are causing changes in the choice of floor types. Although raised flooring has been a staple for first-generation data cabling management techniques, modern IT facilities are moving towards hard flooring. For instance, most data centres are installing overhead cable trays and replacing raised floors with hard flooring. Therefore, if you work in a data centre that has raised flooring, it is time to convince the management to make the shift for the proper performance of data cabling. This article highlights how data cabling benefits from hard flooring.

The Ubiquity of Fibre Cables

One of the main reasons why raised flooring has been pervasive for most first-generation cable works is the risk of signal degradation. Since legacy IT facilities used multiconductor copper data cabling to link IT cabinets, long data cables would lead to loss of signal impulses, thereby interrupting or slowing down operations. Consequently, data centres used shorter copper cables to minimise the attenuation, and the only way to reduce the distance between data cables and IT cabinets was to install the data cables under raised floors. However, the risk of signal degradation in wires has become a thing of the past since fibre optic and high-bandwidth ethernet interconnectivity has become ubiquitous. Today, data centres can use extended overhead data cables without worrying about signal interruptions.

Reduced Static Discharge

Static electricity is a significant threat to IT facilities, especially when data cabling is done in bundles under raised flooring. Since integrated circuit systems are susceptible to electrical interference, solid grounding between interconnected IT equipment and a copper signal reference grid provided the solution to static. As data cabling was installed under the floors, raised flooring acted as the perfect grid reference. Nonetheless, the development of the electrostatic dissipative flooring has eliminated the need for grounding between data cabling bundles and equipment. As a static control measure, electrostatic dissipative flooring allows data centres to install overhead cabling without the need for copper grounding.

Better Data Cabling Protection and High Capacity Requirements 

Decades ago, the power consumption of IT equipment was minimal compared to contemporary data centre equipment. Therefore, cooling systems in raised flooring could handle the cooling requirements that would protect data cables. However, the demand for high storage and computing capacities has led to increased power consumption. It requires adequate cooling, but raised floor cooling systems cannot provide the same. Consequently, current data centres are implementing fresh-air system strategies to ensure the protection of data cabling, and this means hard flooring is ideal.

Speak with a data cabling professional for more information.