24-05-2019 Achieving redundancy with ribbon cables
The German Institute for Data Security (BSI) has published a new guideline for geographical distances between data centers. According to the new criteria, chapter 3.3 PDF-Link BSI recommends a minimal distance of 100 km for back-up data centers. According to the new rules, planners should even calculate a distance of up to 200 km between data centers to be on the safe side. BSI estimates that somewhere in between the range of 100 and 200 km, the optimal data safety resides, whereas more distance would be detrimental for issues of latency and lesser distance would be dangerous as well. Because if a natural disaster hits an area, if there is some distance in between the data centers, the risk that such a disaster brings down both data centers goes down as well. Clearly in such extreme situations, building data centers spread out from one another is good practice and improves data security. Statistically it is very improbable that any natural disaster will devastate larger than 100 km areas at one time. Building distance between data centers therefore becomes crucial to receiving a better ranking in risk assessment and therefore better insurance coverage, a major driver of cost.
The physical requirement of having dedicated fiber improves the business case for ribbon cables, the new trend in the fiber industry. The higher the fiber count, the more efficient the ribbon technology becomes. Whenever Service Level Agreements demand dedicated fiber between racks, such layer 1-connections can push the fiber counts up to several thousands in a cable. In such instances ribbon-fibers with 12-fiber bundles are obviously ideal. Typically such fiber counts range from 1728 Fibers to 3.456 Fibers in each cable. Securing fast and cost efficient connections is the bread and butter business of German company denk-stein:net which offers full concepts of fiber cables, closure, splice- and measurement equipment for the build out of high fiber count networks. Large efficiency gains become possible with the new 12-fiber bundle design with ribbon.