I was recently invited to speak at several events on the Arabian Peninsula. copper clad aluminum wire suppliers Obtaining visas and vaccination documents in preparation for the almost three-week, five-city tour was quite a challenge—as was airport security once I arrived. Apparently, no one liked the idea of the electronics and wires of Belden’s demonstration kit traveling in the airliner cargo hold…
While much of my adventure could be better summed up in a travel warning blog, I did have the opportunity to visit with colleagues, customers and partners to glean plenty of feedback on the data center trends of the region. In doing so, I realized that the portion of my presentation focusing on energy savings wasn’t exactly of great concern in the region—in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, gasoline is just 45 cents a gallon.
Following are some trends I saw that do matter in the Middle East.
- Quality of Products: Data center managers in the Middle East see the importance of installing high quality products manufactured in North America and Europe. Too many of them have been burned by off-shore inferior and counterfeit cabling and components. They consistently reiterated their desire to only buy the best, and showing them headroom, high quality cabinets, intelligent PDUs and elegant cable management solutions pretty much guaranteed a sale.
- World Class DC Consideration: Data center operators in the Middle East have a strong sense copper clad steel wire manufacturers of pride in designing, building and operating a world class data center. Using standard measurements of quality like Tier level certification, PUE and other measurements are very important here, and questions surrounding these methods were a re-occurring event. Learning about the ASHRAE TC9.9 standard and newer operating temperatures of equipment was a big topic of interest during our breakout sessions.
- Cooling and Containment: In a region where summer temperatures can reach 130° F and water is a precious resource, cooling the data center was an obvious concern. Data center managers here are faced with many outages due to overtaxing the cooling systems, and common methods like proper insulation and maintenance are not enough to solve the problem. Topics of interest included various containment strategies and free cooling during evening hours in winter months where temperatures can fall to 50° F.
- Owner-Operator versus Multi-Tenant: The growing trend around the world to lower capital expense by shifting away from owning and operating your own data center to using a multi-tenant data center was not very prevalent in the Middle East. Driven by the desire for secure, low-risk sovereignty, most were not looking at any other option aside from being an enterprise data center owner.
- Virtualization and the Cloud: Adoption of virtualization in the Middle East is slightly behind the pace we’ve been seeing in North America. The use of cloud services was also not very prevalent, but appeared to have the potential of gaining momentum as services became available. However, there was still much hesitance in putting critical applications in the cloud.
- Intelligent Patch Panels and DCIM: The desire to follow best practices and have the latest and greatest technology to secure, track and monitor data center assets was high on the list of interests in the Middle East. The Belden Patch-Pro® we introduced at the events received an overwhelming response. Click here for more information.
All in all, my visit to the Middle East was tremendously educational from a data center perspective. Beyond what I learned that’s of interest for this blog, I will also treasure the many other wonders of the desert I encountered during my travels—from the dust storms and brilliant sunsets, to a dedicated, devout people and the magnificent moon rising in a thin crescent above the horizon.
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