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In defining a good Structured Cabling System, most of us would agree that performance is everything. Yet in the time critical activity of an office fit out, performance takes a back seat to delivery. CGU, one of Australia’s largest insurance companies, put the skills of a broad team of cabling specialists to the test last year to deliver a structured cabling system that was not only flexible, scalable and future-proof to suit the needs of CGU, but also delivered it in record time.
When Commercial Union merged with NZI Insurance’s parent company, General Accident, it became CGU Insurance, one of the top 15 general insurers in the world. In Australia, CGU is now a leading insurer, with more than 80 branches around the country.
The merger and accompanying technology upgrades, as well as the inevitable moves, adds and changes (MACs) associated with staff and departmental adjustments, kept CGU Networks’ team leader, Ray Grima fully occupied. He not only had to deal with a new range of network architectures, but varying types and categories of cabling infrastructure. Overnight, data cabling became a nation-wide project for the company, having to deal with newly acquired offices, and the consolidation of other offices, together with plans to establish new offices in the near future. These offices were scattered over five states and involved several buildings of varying sizes, condition, and age.
For example, CGU staff now occupy 12 floors of a Spring Street building in Sydney, a brand new premises in Newcastle, and three refurbished premises in Melbourne, as well as smaller offices in Perth, Adelaide and Hobart. Planning the cabling solution The cabling system was designed by Memorex Telex Asia Pacific who, according to Memorex’s Ian Carr had two weeks to get floor plans of all the sites in major cities and establish accessibility (through ceilings, concrete floors and the like). „We organised contractors all over the country for the cabling, moving PC hardware and flexes and reconnecting them. It was a tricky situation having two companies running in the same location on two different systems.”
A Melbourne cabling contracting company, Cable Works, which was chosen because of its previous excellent record with Commercial Union Insurance, handled the cabling installations for the two large corporate sites, and the multi-floor refits. Other installation contractors engaged by Memorex Telex included LAN Communications in NSW, Allied in ACT, GR Services in Perth and DEVV (now KLM Queensland) in Queensland. All excellent companies, says Ian Carr, who added that the two directors of Cable Works, Kevin Flannigan and Vince Mobilio, took a „very personal interest in everything their company did. They’d drive up from Melbourne to Sydney with a trailer full of components when couriers couldn’t promise to deliver on time. They really went the extra mile.”
And with sites in both Melbourne and Sydney simultaneously being cabled up, Cable Works’ project manager, James Ferguson, juggled both sites with great precision, racking up thousands of frequent flyer points in a few short months in the process.
To illustrate the extremely tight schedule, CGU senior management selected their Sydney building only one week before work was to start. James made an urgent trip from Melbourne to Sydney just to identify the backbone routes and to develop a suitable redundancy path that would be consistent with CGU’s vital disaster recovery strategy. The resultant design incorporated a sixteen-core multimode optical fibre run from the computer room to each floor, together with eight Cat5E links, and two separate daisy-chain links to each floor in different conduits inside the same riser.
„Even though the Enhanced Category 5 UTP cabling standard had not been ratified at that time, we always advised clients about the advantages of its performance capabilities above Category 5 cabling,” James said.
„We also recommended that at every location where someone was likely to sit, a minimum of a three outlet wall plate should be installed. Each outlet was exactly the same: Ethernet on the left, phone on the right, and a control system in the middle. So a staff member requiring only a phone plugs straight into the right hand side.”
Tight time frame
Most office fit-out programs are run in a tight time frame. But the CGU project was extraordinary. The work required Cable Works staff, together with Ray’s team, to work along with, or just in front of carpenters, carpet layers and painters, as well accommodating CGU staff who needed to get on with their work at the same time.
„Much of the early part of the project involved planning and designing the system,” said Vince Mobilio. „With staged works like this you need to plan in advance very carefully. Although the project started a year ahead, the amount of time we had to do the actual job was very short. But we met every deadline.” „One of the facts of life our industry has to face is that we are usually the last service to go in after the chippies, the electricians, the HVAC people, and even the furniture guys,” James Ferguson said. „It pays to check with the other trades, like the people who are putting the phones in. Their timing didn’t always match with what I was told. You could go to site meetings and come out thinking everything is under control, but there’s always an unforeseen issue about to rear its head. We also had to cater for some legacy systems in the transition period to make sure a stable operating environment was maintained during rollout. That made the task even more complex, because we couldn’t just rip out the old cabling and networking equipment and start from scratch. We had to very carefully work around it, making sure not to interfere with it, because dozens of CGU people were still using it.”
Hallmarks of good workmanship
Neatness and organisation are the hallmarks of a good installation. Cable Works even went beyond the norm of good installation practices by providing CGU with specially designed record books and instructions on how staff could fill them in every time connections were moved at the patch panel, to ensure the long term manageability of the cabling infrastructure. Removable floor tiles were installed in key areas to enable the long lines of neatly-tied blue UTP cabling to be regularly inspected (and admired for their precision, according to Ray Grima, who has praised Cable Works „outstanding workmanship” for its form as well as its substance). All the cables and connectors used in the installation were supplied by Molex Premise Networks. Routers were by Cisco, and cabinets by MFB.
Increased Value Through Partnerships
„I’m a big fan of Molex products,” James said. „Apart from great product reliability, their service was first-class. If we needed more products on site on a Saturday, no worries, there it was, even if it was just a bag of patch leads. Molex, and their distributor, Mod-Systems (recently acquired by Pacific Datacom) really are a part of our team. When we are tendering for a job, we present not only our work, but also the supplier’s involvement and their credentials. Clients get both Cable Works and Molex as part of a whole package consisting of manufacturer, distributor and contractor. We say, 'this is how we come – as a team’. No matter what questions are fired at us, we can cover all the bases. With major installations like CGU, it gives the client an extra degree of confidence that everyone is in synch.”
The Molex Premise Networks cabling system at CGU was designed so that there would be less physical changes at the patch panel, and more programming changes in the future to cater for the inevitable MACs. „The more that can be done, the less the cost, and the more flexible the system is in the long run,” said James.
A Vast and Diverse Network
Ray Grima looks after all of the vast and diverse CGU Information Systems network, which comprises of PABXs for voice communications, and routers and several old legacy computer systems for data communications, linking the 2,400 staff of the newly formed CGU Insurance company. Ray also manages a complex communication system which links CGU with its associated insurance brokers around the country, as well as the communications facilities for the Disaster Recovery Centre.
„We now have what we wanted-a fantastic system that really works,” Ray said proudly. „There’s no doubt that the [OSI] Layer One cable infrastructure which we, in conjunction with Memorex Telex and Cable Works, have deployed to 95% of our sites, is well suited for our present and our future business needs. Given the aggressive project schedule we all had to work to, what was delivered greatly exceeded our expectations.
„When we first moved into the La Trobe Street building in Melbourne many years ago, Cat 1-style cabling was in place. At that time, our main volume of data traffic was 3270 signals to dumb terminals via RJ12 Baluns. We were also running some of the 3270 traffic over a Token Ring network using a comms manager as a gateway to the host. Due to the type of cabling deployed back in the early 1990s, a 4 Megabit per second Token Ring data speed was all we could achieve. And at that speed we did not have 100% stability.
The upgrade to the Information System to service the merger presented us with an opportunity to upgrade the cabling at the same time. We had Molex Category 5E UTP cabling installed in each of the floors, and Molex optical fibre as the backbone medium. At present we are running Ethernet/IP on a Cisco Catalyst configuration.
It’s a 100 Megabit per second backbone with 10 Megabits per second to the desktop. All our LAN 3270 access is also done in the Cisco world via a CIP, which is our TN3270 interface to the IBM mainframe.
The office tenancy reshuffle resulting from the merger meant that we needed to address rewiring the main buildings as our first task. We did that by utilising the infrastructure we already had in most instances. Then we basically revamped the whole network platform. Getting the cabling system right was the main objective here and we achieved that in conjunction with the Memorex Telex and Cable Works team. Once we got that right – where and how it was installed and how it met the required capacity of the desktop – everything else would fall into place. It’s substance as well as form, all right. A very substantial part of a data communication system indeed.
CGU Main Data Centre
Another major project for CGU Networks resulting from the merger was the move of its Main Data Centre in South Melbourne to its La Trobe Street office. The day we carried out the move, there was a team of us here all through the night, Cable Works included”
Ray said. All was completed over a weekend. That was an exercise that required surgeon-like precision. There was no room for error with that move. I don’t mind admitting that I was more than a little nervous that weekend. Months of planning went into this move, as downtime for the next business working day was not an option. By the Monday morning after the move, all systems were available and for CGU, it was business as usual. Hardly anyone was aware of the massive amount of work that went on over the weekend to effect the change. And I’m glad of that because it means we delivered a seamless upgrade with no interruption to the vital flow of information.”
What emerges out of the analysis of this installation is that, despite an extremely aggressive schedule, further amplified by complex work conditions, the project was still delivered on time, and fully compliant to the specifications due to careful planning and a committed group of cabling professionals who worked as a single cohesive team.
