Time for another update from the world of DC3.

Demand for rack space has been amazing. Another 37 racks arrived yesterday and are mostly bayed awaiting the completion of the data cabling and power to their rack positions. Both are well advanced and should be completed next week, now that the racks are in place.

The first customer in these racks (in rows 3 & 4) starts moving in mid next week! That's just over quarter of the new racks gone in one hit!





Below is a photo of one of the FM-200 fire suppression bottles - the facility employs 4 FM-200 bottles to supply the gas to the 3 areas (underfloor, abovefloor and electrical switch room).



All up, around 950kg of FM-200 gas. The red FM-200 bottle in the photo contains 334kg of gas, and weighs 563kg overall.

The black bottles are nitrogen bottles - these are used to provide additional pressure to push the FM-200 through the pipe runs to the gas heads.

We're told that our above-floor FM-200 system in DC3 is the largest single FM-200 system in Brisbane, and one of only a small handful of nitrogen assisted systems in the country.

Other works that have been completed include the door open alarms and the security cameras (all 30 of them, all with infra-red illumination). A sample of what we can see is below.



This a low resolution montage - the actual resolution is around 4 times what you see here. Some of the images are black and white because the lights are off - in normal light they're colour.

PIPE also welcomes on-board Brian Redding, starting this coming Monday, to take on the position of Datacentre Manager, managing all of PIPE's datacentre assets nationally.

A quick update on the status of DC3.

The copper data cabling for the first stage is all but complete - the Krone Highband 25 system was installed and passed it's Category-6 certification last week.



The overhead fibre tray is almost complete - only a couple of 45 degree bends still pending in the entry foyer. Waterfalls are on order to allow services to be neatly dropped into customer racks.





The success of DC3 has been amazing - so much so that we've already started fitting out the next two rows of racks (another 37 racks). The cable trays and fibre trays for these next two rows are already in place.

With the datacentre construction pretty much complete, it's time to start breathing life into an otherwise empty facility.



Photo 1: We have power to the facility (we've had the power on for a good few days now)




Photo 2: This is one of the three power analysers we have on the supply switchboard. This photo was taken pretty early on when the only load was the lights. On launch day we were consuming around 75A/phase. To put that in perspective, that's roughly 25% of what DC1 & DC2 use combined (and they're full). DC3 is currently empty! These analysers also give us an indication of the number of kilowatt hours we've consumed, the power factor of the load, and a multitude of other parameters.




Photo 3: Unless you were at the launch, this is probably the first time you've seen the first two rows of B&R racks. There's more racks to the left of the photo - I just couldn't get far enough back to fit them all into the frame.




Photo 4: This is the first 10 gigabit link into DC3. This link is the first of two fully diverse circuits that will link DC3 into PIPE's metro ethernet network. On launch day we had a single 1 gigabit link that was used primarily to carry the live video for the videocast (it also carried VoIP traffic from the phone extension we put on-site for the day).




Photo 5: This is the first couple of single core gigabit circuits into our Foundry MPLS router at DC3. The lefthand circuit is where the intercapital MPLS network cross connects to the Brisbane metro network (there's currently 3 of these at 3 different sites). The righthand link connects the MPLS router back to another MPLS router in DC1, and the spare GBIC is for a fully diverse link back to the same MPLS router at DC1. There's another link being installed shortly to yet another site.

To view the opening ceremoy live, visit the link below, ceremony is scheduled to start at 4.30pm. Seperate links for video and audio.

mms://bcast2.qld.abbn.tv/PipeDC3Vi­deo [Windows Media]

Audio version of stream:

mms://bcast2.qld.abbn.tv/PipeDC3Au­dio [Windows Media]
..or..
bcast1.qld.abbn.tv:8000/listen.pls [Shoutcast/Winamp]