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.

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.