Productivity is the key to survival in today’s globally competitive environment. When the basic inputs to production including time, labour and materials are considered, there isn’t much room for optimisation. Organisations operate 24 hours per day, labour is costly and choice in materials is limited, which means every company must use automation to gain more output from the same inputs, or perish. Organisations that rely on automation need to ensure continuous operation. [ + ]

Costly business disruption and remedial work can be attributed to performance problems in data centres, operational network systems and software applications. These issues often go undetected prior to launch due to the difficulty of conducting realistic performance testing. Quantifiable consequences of undetected performance problems include: revenue loss, customer base erosion and brand damage. All of these issues call into question a business’s long-term viability. Since the advent of network testing, Spirent test engineers have helped hundreds of clients save thousands of testing hours, which resulted in bringing products and services to market faster and with higher quality. [ + ]

Much has already been written about the pressures driving the enterprise to migrate to IPv6, but what about the positive performance benefits it could bring? asks Alan Way, International Development Manager, Spirent Communications. [ + ]

Within the electrical industry there is increasing concern regarding the number of electrical products being sold that don’t comply with Australian Standards. These products, whilst appearing genuine, are often made from inferior materials with little regard for meeting stated ratings or safety requirements. Compliance with Australian Electrical Safety Standards is important to ensure product quality, reliability and, most critically, the safety of the electrical contractor during installation and their customer throughout the operational life of the product. [ + ]

As part of an ongoing lighting maintenance program, AMP Capital Shopping Centres, which manages Macquarie Centre, recently embarked on a centre-wide re-lamping project, replacing the metal-halide lighting in the centre’s popular Loft precinct, which is an area that caters to shoppers’ lifestyle and homewares requirements. AMP turned to preferred supplier and lighting/electrical specialist KP Lighting to provide a lighting solution that would deliver premium energy efficiency without compromising lighting performance. KP Lighting specified, installed and commissioned an energy-saving LED lighting solution from Philips. [ + ]

The exponential growth, expanding bandwidth demand and delivery requirements in global networking for video, voice and data applications are accelerating at a speed never before seen. For many, the original transport backbone architecture built on 10G wavelengths is at the threshold of capacity. Higher-speed 40G and 100G are the next-generation transport solutions that enable and define future success for service providers, network equipment manufacturers and a growing number of enterprises. Recognising the right steps of due diligence, which include testing, can ensure the delivery of all the benefits expected of this game-changing solution. [ + ]

Criticism of photovoltaic (PV) is usually based on the conflict between efficiency and subsidies. When evaluating efficiency, however, all factors have to be accounted for. The ‘true’ costs that Friedman is referring to are even more difficult to quantify in the post-Fukushima era. The costs caused by climate change are also rarely taken into account in efficiency calculations. [ + ]

A developer once told me, "I throw out the connectors wherever possible. They take up space, they cost money and they are one of the main causes for device failures." The man was right. But: globally, there are more than 2000 connector manufacturers, there are more than 200 completely different basic series (D-SUB, RJ45, USB, DIN cylindrical connector, etc) and there are individual manufacturers who produce more than 10,000, 50,000 or even 100,000 different models. Then why? Because such a wide variety of connectors is necessary! [ + ]

The term ‘docking systems’ might not mean much to most readers. Perhaps they would think of their laptop, which is placed on to a docking station, or they might think of an airplane that docks. [ + ]

The following discussion gives a brief explanation of some of the highlights and features of connectors in medical technology, and also a few examples. [ + ]

Installing GE Lighting LED solutions at its Bethesda, Maryland headquarters will save Marriott International 860,000 kWh of electricity and more than $120,000 in combined energy and maintenance costs each year. The installation included nearly 45 acres - or 185,000 m² - of parking and garage space and eight floors of internal lighting. [ + ]

Network Test has completed the industry’s first public 1536 port 10 G ethernet test of QFabric, Juniper Networks’ data centre network fabric, using Spirent’s HyperMetrics dX test module. This independent test reflects real-world data centre set-ups, with millions of application flows between any set of ports, and has important implications for cloud computing, storage and financial applications such as high-frequency trading and big data analytics. [ + ]

With the rapid developments in PON/GPON technologies, equipment manufacturer of gigabit passive optical network (GPON) equipment Cambridge Industries Group (CIG) needed to significantly shorten product release cycle times and address the high volume and complex testing requirements of GPON. [ + ]

For a northern Arizona resort, supplementing Mother Nature with manufactured snow provides a predictable ski season that could inject millions of dollars into the local economy. Controlled wirelessly, roughly 5.5 million litres of reclaimed effluent water from a nearby city would be needed daily to blanket the arid climate in fresh snow. [ + ]

WorkCover NSW has issued a Safety Alert for working on electrical circuits in conduits, reminding electrical workers of the dangers of cutting electrical conduits that are in service as the conduits may contain multiple circuits. [ + ]