PIPE Networks Limited will this Wednesday 20th June, 2007 open their 6th Metropolitan Data Centre in Australia which is also the Company’s 3rd Data Centre in Brisbane. The official opening of “DC3” will be a celebration of the significant growth of this young Queensland company. Officially opening the facility and addressing the audience on PIPE Networks’ contribution to the local ICT economy and Queensland Government Smart State vision will be Minister for State Development, The Honourable John Mickel, MP.

The carrier neutral facility will provide critical infrastructure to support the current and future growth, and requirements for secure and reliable data storage facing the ICT industry and local companies.

“Queensland continues to grow with the support of strong government policy and the need for services is driving a huge increase in ICT capacity. Our latest Data Centre will make available more than 350sqm of much needed commercial data centre space” PIPE Networks Managing Director, Mr Bevan Slattery said.

In an industry where such fit-out processes commonly take in excess of 6 months, the challenge was set to finish the facility in only 60 days. The opening ceremony will represent the 66th day since the challenge was set.

The clean up has begun, as contractors start to move out their equipment.

Builders have finished the wall on which communications will be terminated, and we have arranged for the mains power to go on tonight. Our fibre splicing technician also continued work on the connections (we have included some photos of his work below, as requested in an earlier comment by one of the blog watchers). The only things left to happen here at DC3 is for fire suppression pipe work to have it’s finishing touches, the air-conditioning to be fired up, security installation to be completed and the final clean of the site.

As part of the mains power-up later today, and the final clean up of the ceiling, our trusty web cams will be decommissioned. Thank you for your keen interest in watching the goings-on of DC3 via the images these cameras brought to us. We have a complete history of the web cam photos, and we’ll be on the hunt to find a tool that will take these thousands of images and collate them to make a movie - which perhaps we can review come time for our next Data Centre build.

Yesterday we said a huge thank you to all the contractors that made the DC3 build run as smoothly as it has, but we didn’t mention the man that has managed the daily fit-out, wrote most of these blog entries and made such a momentous build possible. Thank you to Bob Purdon, our GM of Managed Infrastructure, for his unwavering dedication to the insane task at hand, his 6am starts and 9pm finishes, his good humour when faced with yet another DC drama, and for being the man with the golden fingers every time our web cams went off line. We appreciate your efforts!







Stay tuned for more information on the official opening event being held next Wednesday...

OK, today is day 60, and we obviously still have a bit of work to do.

What's interesting to note is that this 60 days started on the day we kicked the project implementation off. Counting from the day the contractors actually got underway, you'll see we've accomplished a lot in 49 construction days.

We're remarkably close to completion - our major delay at the moment is connection of the electrical supply to the main switchboard - almost everything else electrical is installed and awaiting mains power so it can be commissioned and handed over. Mains connection is scheduled for Saturday.



Likewise, the air conditioning commissioning and handover is waiting primarily on mains power. The refrigerant lines have been pressure tested with nitrogen and are currently being evaculated (vacuum pumps remove all the air, and in turn moisture, from the lines in preparation for them being charged with refrigerant). For those wondering, the orange circular cable isn't power cable - it's a 2 core cable for signalling that's unrelated to the operation of the A/C unit itself.

We've started doing mock ups of rack positioning so everyone can see how it's going to look, but we can't bay the racks together just yet because we will need to move them on Monday while the cleaners are in. These specialist datacentre cleaners will be lifting all the tiles and wiping and vacuuming all the surfaces. Once this is complete, the PIPE infrastructure team will hit the room and bay everything together in their correct locations.

The fire suppression guys still have a reasonable amount of work to get done - the FM-200 pipework is well underway, as is the VESDA detection pipework. It'll come together pretty quickly though.

The internal wall that our structured cabling infrastructure is to be installed on was partly erected today. The other side of it will be erected most likely tomorrow.

The fire doors were hung today - one set of double doors for the datacentre entry doorway, and one set of double doors for the UPS room doorway.

Painters will be back over the next day or two to touch up those spots we've managed to get dirty and to patch holes that were created when legacy cables and pipes were removed.



Above are 3 of the contractors working on-site - this was taken tonight as they were packing up for the day. There's many more of them, but most had already left for the day.

These contractors have done an amazing job of keeping the project moving in the face of externally imposed delays.

With the 60 day deadline drawing scarily close, the data centre is very nearing completion, but with one day to go it looks like we will run overtime due to external factors. If you take a look at the Progress page you can see that many of the tasks have been completed, but there are also many that are still under construction.

Today the first shipment of customer racks arrived (50 in total), there will be another delivery tomorrow morning (of approximately 30). For those of you watching the web cams and laughing at us as we tried to get them through the construction zone out the back door, they are now safely inside DC3 and we have begun positioning them into their rows.

Security installation is well underway. As is work on the fire suppression system with another big chunk of pipe work being completed today.

Also of note is the entry ramp into the data centre which was constructed today and will be completed tomorrow.

So with the final sprint towards Day 60 of this challenge, we wait and see (fingers crossed) as to how much we can get completed by the end of tomorrow…

The first delivery of BNR customer racks arrived nice and early at 6.30 this morning.


You can see the ceiling is noticeably less cluttered compare to previous photos after the removal of un-necessary cabling this afternoon.

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.