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.

The rack distribution boards were bolted to the wall earlier today - there's 8 of them in total (7 in this picture). These will feed the power to the customer racks. The cabling out to the racks has also started and is progressing very well.



More flooring went in today, with the remainder expected to be complete tomorrow.

The diverse PIPE Networks fibre was hauled into the back of the building today ready for the Tyco fibre racks to be delivered to site tomorrow.

There's a strong chance that the first of our customer racks will arrive on-site tomorrow also - although this is dependent in part on some external building works being undertaken by the landlord.

More air conditioning pipework was installed (there's a lot of work involved in plumbing these, and we had some unexpected delays that slowed work down a bit).

More air conditioning pipework today, with the run up to the roof well underway, and the cross floor runs also nearing completion. Once done, they'll be charged with nitrogen to ensure they can hold the pressure before being filled with R22 refrigerant.



A little more cable tray went down today, and the assembly of the battery jumper cables started.

We expect the floor will be substantially completed this week, as will the underfloor power distribution. The first racks should also be turning up this week.

With such recent progress here at DC3, we are confident we will meet our 60 day build target!

Invitations went out today to invite PIPE supporters to our official opening event on June 20th, 2007. Now while that's 6 days after the 60 day build will conclude, we are unable to host the event an earlier due to the building's construction of the main entrance to the ground floor tenancy (where DC3 is located).

If you are interested in coming along to the event, please email amanda.banks@staff.pipenetworks.com to request an invitation with all the details.

And some more good news... after a contractor mistakenly disconnected power to one of our webcams, we now have that back on-line and snapping away.