Case Study: Infrastructure gives Yorkshire Water information on tap !
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Yorkshire Water provides water and waste water services to more than 4.7 million people and 140,000 businesses throughout Yorkshire and Humberside. Every day it supplies 1.3bn litres of drinking water which is equivalent to a glass of water for every person on the planet! The water company is also responsible for collecting, treating and disposing of around a billion litres of waste water each day. It operates more than 700 water and sewage treatment works and 120 reservoirs.
Employing 2,200 people, Yorkshire Water aims to be ‘clearly the best water company in the UK’. Its IT infrastructure is an essential element of reaching this goal so when the company decided to create a new data centre it wanted world class.
Working with STS, its long standing partner in IP network solutions, Yorkshire Water moved its data centre and IT and customer services departments to a new purpose-built two-storey centre.
The new data centre is truly mission critical as not only does it serve the needs of basic business functions; it supports some of the automated systems that control the quality and distribution of water and associated services.
In addition, it was vital that the data centre be future-proof and capable of handling additional telemetry systems and business applications.
Knowing that there had to be a smooth migration from one location to another and that ongoing monitoring of the network was paramount, STS was confident in turning to CommScope, a global leader in infrastructure solutions for communications networks.
Working with STS and CommScope, Yorkshire Water chose the SYSTIMAX iPatch® System. iPatch® uses intelligent patching technology to help cut network management costs, provide insight into the physical layer and give real-time results in order to automate change management and help prevent downtime.
Where information flow is crucially important, SYSTIMAX iPatch® provides Yorkshire Water with real time infrastructure management which means the company can be confident it has access to the information required to run a heavily regulated business. Using iPatch®, Yorkshire Water has 20/20 vision into its physical layer infrastructure and can become automatically aware of unexpected changes in connectivity and can even make changes to the network from remote locations.
It was the high level of transparency to the system that persuaded Yorkshire Water that SYSTIMAX iPatch® was the solution for its data centre. Yorkshire Water also chose the SYSTIMAX GigaSPEED® X10D solution which was specifically designed to support emerging 10 Gigabit Ethernet requirements.
The SYSTIMAX GigaSPEED® X10D UTP Solution complies with the ratified IEEE 802.3an 10GBASE-T standard and fully complies with the new Class EA cabling channel specifications and Category 6A cabling specifications. Important for Yorkshire Water was the fact that the SYSTIMAX GigaSPEED® X10D Solution supports its high bandwidth needs, a mission-critical data centre and the requirements of more demanding telemetry applications.
The final installation comprised of over 100 kilometres of cabling, 420 GigaSPEED® XL Cat6 outlets and 4,100 panel to panel GigaSPEED® X10D interconnects. The complex seven-month project which included migrating around 300 development, QA and other mission critical servers from the old town centre data centre to the modern premises was conducted with no downtime. The 12-strong project team was made up of STS engineers and Yorkshire Water’s own in-house team.
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