Building for the future

Canberra Data Centres (CDC) was formed in 2007 with the purpose of being a trusted partner for data centre services. CDC currently operates three data centres, each of which is custom-designed and built to provide the utmost functionality, security and reliability, with a focus on environmental concerns.

The Department of Immigration and Border Protection recently looked to install an AFL MTP solution in the CDC.

“There were a range of factors that forced us to move our in-house data centre into a colocation data centre. The primary reason was the inability of our existing DC to support the new higher density Compute and Storage platforms that the Department intended to migrate to,” said Nathan McGlynn, MACS [Snr] CP, Data Centre and Infrastructure Services for the Department.

“Another reason was the lack of power required to run our systems, as we were constantly running at 75–85% of the total power capacity,” said McGlynn.

The final factor was to align with the AGIMO Data Centre policy to reduce the number of in-house centres run by government agencies and relocate to ‘greener’, more efficient, colo facilities. CDC worked closely with AFL staff and MultiSystem Communications (certified system designers and installers) to design a solution to best meet the Department’s needs.

A combination of AFL’s optical fibre distribution frames (OFDF), MTP cabling, Category 6 copper and enclosures was used in the network to ensure an effective outcome. 

AFL’s high-density MTP solution, coupled with the OFDF, provides high-speed communications in a limited space. This allows more efficient cooling, reducing cooling costs and the amount of power needed.

Challenges associated with the project included the sheer volume of the fibre core count (5000+ cores) that was installed and tested within a four-week window.

Some of the backbone trunk connections were required to patch directly from a fibre enclosure into active equipment, requiring the design of a custom trunk with a 24-fibre MTP connector on one end that fanned out to three 8-fibre MTP connectors on the other. The active equipment was a BROCADE BLADE CHASSIS, which had a specific pin-out configuration. It was fundamental that the configuration was considered when the trunks were being manufactured to ensure the correct input/output fibre cores aligned with each other.

This was of particular importance as there was also further patching from the fibre enclosure through other backbone cabling into different cabinets in the POD. This process proved to be quite involved but, with help from the AFL team, a custom trunk was designed and manufactured to suit the specific needs of the end user.