New AIM Solution Provides Up-to-Date, Accurate Reports on Your Physical Network

How confident are you that the cabling documentation for your data center is 100 percent accurate and up to date? If you’re relying on a conventional spreadsheet or even on paper and pencil, it can be hard to keep up with the frequent changes impacting critical networks.

That’s why Nexans developed LANsense, an Automated Infrastructure Management (AIM) solution. LANsense automates the documentation of your physical network and allows you to manage it more efficiently. This integrated hardware and software solution can:

• help you monitor and manage your organizations’ physical layer network remotely
• suggest the best routing path for performing and managing moves, adds and changes
• provide a virtual view of the network
• help discover networking equipment and end devices using SNMP.

Rahul Rathod, product manager for LANsense at Nexans Cabling Solutions, says there is a proven need for an AIM solution for passive cabling infrastructure.

“Documentation for all the cabling infrastructure and related equipment created during installation will be accurate for a short time, but not over a network’s lifespan of ten to fifteen years,” Rahul says. “Teams change over time, and the growth of the organization will lead to additional cabling infrastructure requirements, with more users, changes to user locations, and more devices.

“With all of these changes, maintaining 100 percent accuracy on documentation using non-automated methods is extremely challenging,” he says.

The idea behind AIM isn’t new – it’s been around for two decades – and its concept has always been the same: accurate, automated documentation of the cabling infrastructure and connected equipment. However, there has been some confusion about it in the industry, in part because it was also known by other acronyms, such as IIIM and IPLM. But that has changed.

“Thanks to the publication of ISO/IEC 18598 in 2016, there is now a clear definition of AIM systems,” Rahul says. “This not only defines the scope of AIM but also addresses the requirements for a management tool that can be called an AIM solution.”

LANsense provides real-time two-dimensional graphical views of equipment rooms, cabinets/racks, networking equipment, cabling, patch panels and active equipment. The software gives a quick and simplified overview of the status of your network infrastructure on the home page and generates reports, while an interactive Floor Planner tool is used to document the physical location of the various elements and items related to cabling infrastructure.

For more information on LANsense, please contact ncs.uk@nexans.com or visit our website.