COVERSTORY

From the April 2004  issue of Communications News

New Building, Better Network

Captaris IT director Roopal MacDuff opts for fiber and Category 6 cabling for new headquarters.

When your business is communications and information delivery, your network infrastructure becomes vital to delivering the tools of your trade. Captaris, a 21-year-old provider of business information delivery solutions, recently relocated its headquarters into a new building in Bellevue, Wash. In doing so, the IT staff researched many infrastructure models before selecting the most efficient enterprise premises network for its product-development testing labs and for administration, also referred to as the “production” network.

Captaris, with communications contractor D.W. Close Co., designed a voice and data system that includes two physical networks incorporating a high-density enhanced Category 6 channel solution. The new system provides the speed and bandwidth required for today’s applications, including voice-over-IP (VoIP).

From enterprise fax and e-document delivery to workflow and business-process automation workflow, Captaris provides business information delivery solutions that integrate, process and automate the flow of messages, data and documents. The company’s products include RightFax, for enterprise fax and e-document delivery; and Teamplate, a business-process automation solution built on the Microsoft .NET framework for Web services.

Captaris relies heavily on its own internal infrastructure for daily operations. This setup allows the company to maintain a strong product development focus, providing 93 of the Fortune 100 companies with advanced business-information delivery solutions though the company’s global distribution channel.

Problems arose at the company’s previous headquarters when the voice and data network became outdated. With a Category 3-based voice system and data being pushed over Category 4, the Captaris network was running at snail speeds for bandwidth-intensive applications.

“We had problems with power restrictions; and the ability to support our infrastructure was not there,” explains Roopal MacDuff, director of corporate IT at Captaris. “It became clear that we had to move. It’s a lot easier to deal with a new building that’s been preplanned to accommodate a high-speed network, as opposed to one that was built in 1981. This became the most cost-effective solution for Captaris to grow the business.”

Captaris decided to move into two-and-one-half floors of a 12-story building, which was a part of a modern three-building complex. “We started out by looking at everything we didn’t like about the old building and making it right in the new facility. This meant spending a lot of time and effort with the cable design and installation firm to come up with ideas on how we can push the most bandwidth through our system today and tomorrow, all while keeping it neatly organized,” states MacDuff.

PATHWAY DESIGN CRITICAL
D.W. Close put together the design and bid specifications. “In a building of this size, you are dependent on the pathways that are provided in the riser that was designed by the building contractor. D.W. Close, also the electrical contractor, knew that horizontal cabling could easily be laid out to eliminate a lot of crossovers,” says MacDuff.

Jeff Lowe, telecommunications project manager, and Ron Maccario, telecommunications manager, for D.W. Close, worked with MacDuff and her staff–Bryan Madche, network engineer, and John Conlan, network administrator–to come up with a design that could incorporate a high-density, high-bandwidth infrastructure and a WAN for communicating to the company’s other eight worldwide locations. The design would have to lay out 1,500 cable runs, with four to six drops per location. In addition, there would be a separate backup network to be used for the test labs.

“We suggested fiber for the backbone between the main cross connects (MCC) and intermediate cross connects (ICC), to a server room and the four labs, and a Category 6-based modular horizontal solution,” states Lowe. “Although Category 6 was new to the market at the time of the design, we knew that the additional cost would be minimal, about 1% of the entire installation job, but that the benefits would be paramount.”

Because the company and applications are constantly changing, Captaris needed to install a flexible system with modular capabilities in the patch panels and at the workstations. Maccario recommended an Ortronics/Berk-Tek NetClear^GT3 solution for all the cabling and connectivity.

“The products are user-friendly and, more importantly, the system is warranted to deliver maximum network performance from the backbone fiber to the outlet,” he says.

Jeff Lowe, telecommunications project manager, and Ron Maccario, telecommunications manager, for D.W. Close Co., check out the back of the Ortronics Clarity6 patch panel.

An important factor in meeting the four-month time frame for the cable installation, according to the Captaris team, was the ability to get all the Ortronics and Berk-Tek products from the stocking distributor, Graybar. Nationwide distributor has local zone distribution centers for quick response to customer supply requests.

SEPARATE NETWORKS INSTALLED
Two separate networks were installed for security and backup, with the four labs and a server room on a different physical network than the production network. “We decided to separate our test network so that when they are testing the products, they are not operating over our infrastructure,” notes MacDuff. “The purpose of this is that sometimes when they are testing they are using different versions of Windows accessed through the Internet. By going outside of our internal system, it makes them susceptible to viruses.

“We don’t need bad traffic that could possibly affect our production network, so it was best to segregate them. Then, if our WAN connection goes down, we can immediately switch over to the connection used by the separate test network and use it as our production backup.”

The MCC is located on the fourth floor. From there, fiber-optic backbone cable connects the server room, labs and the two ICCs on the third floor, fourth floor and on half of the fifth floor. The fiber-optic cable is terminated into Ortronics ORMMAC fiber-distribution cabinets, located in the top center rack and patched down from there within the data racks.

Both active and passive equipment is housed in each rack for dedicated areas within the facility, either for the production or for the test lab network. The layout per rack contains the Ortronics high-density Clarity6 48-port patch panels on the top for station cabling, the phone and data switches underneath, and then the server and additional station cabling.

For voice, 200-pair cables are punched down to Ortronics 110 blocks and then patched over to the Ortronics Clarity6 patch

panels in the cable-management racks for cross connection. Other than the patch cables that connect the voice from the 110 blocks, there is no cross-connecting between racks, which allows for easy identification and neat communications rooms. “Our primary objective for the layout was to keep all wiring for one area within one rack, so there were no cables crossing racks, and we could easily trace each connection,” states Conlan.

To save in real estate for the amount of dense voice patching, used primarily for the test labs, the 200-pair cable is cross-connected to four separate lines, with one-port connectivity in the closets. Four-pair Category 6 cable is then run to the Ortronics’ TracJack workstation outlets to a corresponding port. This way, each port can have up to four separate voice lines. The six-position TracJack workstation outlets are color-coded to indicate red for digital signal phone, black for analog phone and orange for data.

CATEGORY 6 USED THROUGHTOUT
“With half a million feet of Berk-Tek LANmark-2000 Category 6 cabling running between the two floors, we neatly bundled the cables and ran them overhead in cable-tray, Velcro strapping in the closets and in the modular furniture,” notes Maccario. By using all Category 6 for voice and data cables, every port becomes completely modular.

NetClear^GT3, an enhanced Category 6 cabling solution, is warranted to deliver maximum network performance with an installed minimum channel performance margin of 4 dB above Category 6. The NetClear^GT3 channel solution features 100% component-compliant cable and connectors that are tuned to the center of standards’ requirements for plug performance. “We found that with this system, we were obtaining 14 dB of headroom for some test parameters, which is way beyond the standards,” notes Maccario.

“When it came time for the move, we identified the key servers and we were only down for six hours over a weekend,” notes MacDuff. “Everything was up and running on the first day of business.”

“Because all the phones were punched down ahead of time and all the patch cables were neatly organized and connected in the patch panels, all we had to do was plug into the workstation outlet and it became live. There was not a single mislabeled drop in any cubicle,” notes Madche.

In the meantime, Captaris sold its voice mail and unified messaging product line, CallXpress, and its associated resources that were located on half of the fifth floor. Due to the layout of dedicated racks and active equipment areas, that floor was easily separated from the entire production network.

After the installation, during a company-wide meeting, the executive staff described the move as a “non-event.” MacDuff says, “For an IT group to be invisible during a project like this was probably the biggest compliment we could get.”

About Ortronics

Ortronics Inc., headquartered in New London, Conn., is a provider of enterprise copper Category 5e and Category 6, fiber-optic and residential high-performance, high-capacity structured-cabling systems. Ortronics’ range of connectivity products includes patch panels, patch cords, workstation outlets, cable-management systems, 110 cross-connect systems and more. Ortronics also offers engineering and technical support, systems planning, training programs, and a 25-year extended products warranty and applications assurance warranty program.

Ortronics is ISO 9001 registered and a member of BICSI, TIA/EIA, ISO and other industry standards groups. Ortronics’ parent company, Legrand, headquartered in France, specializes in residential housing and commercial building products, and systems for electrical installations and information networks. With net sales close to $3.5 billion in 2002, the Legrand group employs 27,000 people globally, has operations in 60 locations worldwide and sells in more than 160 countries.

Berk-Tek, a Nexans company, New Holland, Pa., and Ortronics, New London, Conn., formed the NetClear alliance to deliver structured-cabling systems. All of the NetClear solutions provide installed channel performance with guaranteed margin above the standards. NetClear offers end-to-end modular engineered solutions for enhanced Category 5e, Category 6 and optical-fiber channels, including NetClear^GT, NetClear^GT2 and NetClear^GT3 high-performance copper solutions, as well as NetClear^MM1, NetClear^MM10 and NetClearSM fiber-optic solutions. These solutions encompass all horizontal and backbone systems, including high-performance interface cords, workstation outlets, cross-connect panels and enhanced-performance horizontal and backbone cabling.

For more information from Ortronics:
www.rsleads.com/404cn-254

Carol Everett Oliver, is a freelance writer and the principle of Everett Communications, Medway, Mass. (coliver@everettcom.com).