After a long weekend, today saw another busy day in DC3 with more work on the fibre cables which will feed the data centre. The design scheme has changed and this involved a bit of discussion to ensure that everything will be installed smoothly.

Instead of having separate GPS shelves for the street and DC cabling, it was decided that a simplified (and therefore more elegant) solution was needed. As a result each rack’s capacity will double from 432 fibres to 864 as we will now use 12 shelves for street and DC cabling. This will allow us greater flexibility and will reduce the risks to working circuits in the racks as well as the number of cables inside the racks themselves. Of course, another advantage of this solution is that it will help keep the loss on a circuit as low as possible.

After this re-design the splicing got underway with the fibre techs laying up the fibres in the first GPS tray and splicing on the pigtails, making them ready to receive the cables to customer racks as well as allowing for the OTDR testing to take place.


The first tubes are layed up into the GPS tray and cut to length.

Our fire suppression contractors were on-site today working on the pipework for the FM-200 system.



Progress on this, and quite a few other items, has been hampered over recent weeks by limitations being placed upon when we can make noise (even minor tasks like core boring, which make very little noise, have been restricted). Despite this our contractors have done an excellent job of keeping things pretty much on track.

Those paying attention will note that the first batch of racks that were supposed to arrive on Wednesday this week didn't arrive - they're now scheduled to arrive in one batch next Wednesday. The delay has been caused by 3rd party works outside our tenancy that have made deliveries quite difficult. Despite this, it's not expected to cause us any major issues as we can juggle things around to suit.

The flooring itself is now complete, with only the floor vents, cable holes, and access ramps/stairs to be completed.

We'll be cutting out the temporary lighting shortly (left over from the old office fitout) as it's no longer needed. We'll have to be careful though - the two webcams are powered from that circuit :-)

The old smoke detectors and associated wiring will be removed once the VESDA/FM200 system is commissioned, so a lot of legacy roof clutter will be gone for good!

Telstra have already been on-site to look at installing services for our first telehousing customer at DC3. Not surprisingly, they're likely to be the first carrier (after ourselves of course) to deliver a carrier service to a customer in our facility.

The datacentre cleaners are scheduled to come in shortly to do a thorough clean. This involves vacuuming under the floor, wiping under the floor, lifting every floor tile and cleaning the supporting structures, wiping the tiles, the walls, and all the other surfaces. Not an insignificant job!

The raised floor is now just waiting on floor vents to be installed next week, which will make this project for the contractors complete. All our fire suppression pipe work arrived on-site today and is awaiting installation. Electrical work and air conditioning pipe work has continued today, and will be ongoing next week.

Today our splicing technicians began the process of terminating the fibre into the Tyco FIST-GR2 racks. Each rack, when full, will terminate a total of 432 fibres. Each GR2 rack can hold a total of 13 shelves; each shelf has 6 trays with 12 fibres per tray. This gives a total of 72 fibres per shelf. Yesterday one rack was installed on the main data centre floor, the other in an area next to the UPS room (these areas will both be secured by cages) and both racks are directly bolted to the concrete floor to stop them toppling.



In preparation for termination the cables have to be stripped of their outer sheaths and each tube of fibres (24 tubes with 12 fibres in each tube) has to be laid up to prevent damage. The tubes that will be terminated first have to be cleaned and prepped for splicing.

The prepped fibres will then be spliced on to pigtails. From here, the fibres will be patched to a second GPS shelf. This gives us an extra level of separation from the street cable and provides better control of the in-building patching to customers.

The FIST-GR2 provides excellent cable management within the racks to ensure that things don’t get messy and that even when full, the fibre is always 100% accessible without causing damage or an outage for a customer.

The two street cables enter the building via different paths providing a fully diverse path to and from the DC. It will also be possible to maintain diverse paths to a rack within the DC too.

The two PIPE Networks fibre racks arrived last night, and our team of project managers braved the rain to guide them off the crane and into the make shift holding area, which will soon become the lobby.

This morning the FIST–GR2 racks were installed into DC3 for the termination of our primary and diverse trunk fibre feeds. These racks offer a unique physical fiber management system that accommodates connector panels and shelves for splicing, patching, equipment and devices. They also allow a number of different connection configurations; inter-rack and intra-rack, as well as inter-cross and express-through connections.


Crane arrives and sets up for the move, it was reasonably hard in the rain and with the uneven ground of the construction zone.



The first of the racks gets hoisted through what will be the main entry door to DC3.



The rack after installation this afternoon, ready and awaiting more equipment before this fibre can be spliced into the GPS tray.

Those watching the web cam today would have seen our builders hard at work installing the DC3’s false floor, it's almost complete.



This raised floor will allow power and air to be delivered directly to each individual rack. Communications will run overhead, to ensure the air conditioning is efficient by keeping the air plenum as vacant as possible.

DC3’s design is based on a front to back cooling regime with rows of racks spaced between 900-1300mm apart. Air conditioning units fill the space under the raised floor with cold air that gets pushed through the vents placed in front of each rack. We refer to the aisle with these vents as the cool isle, where the cold air is circulated through the racks by the IT equipments own fans and blasted out the other side, into the warm aisle. The air expelled into the warm aisle rises to the top of DC3, where it gets sucked back into the air-conditioning system to be chilled and start the process over again.