Licking Memorial Health Systems – Data Center

Echo 24 had been performing structured cabling services for Licking Memorial Hospital (LMH) for eight years when company President Tony Gunter, RCDD received a call from Sondra Mokos at Turner Construction during the early spring of 2009. Sondra introduced herself and explained that Turner had been hired to build the new data center at LMH and that she had been tasked with forming the design-build team. The purpose of her call was to invite Echo 24 to be a part of it.

With full knowledge that they had long outgrown their current data center, and having recently completed the successful construction of the Critical Care Pavilion in the front of the hospital as a subcontractor to Turner Construction, Tony was excited by the call.

One of the first challenges to be addressed by the design team was the fact that the site that had been identified for the new data center was directly on top of the duct bank that fed voice and data services for the entire hospital and 15 outlying buildings. There was much discussion about the risk of building over top of the duct bank, even the possibility of encasing it in concrete before beginning construction. Ultimately it was decided that the hospital could not tolerate the risk of a catastrophic outage and so Echo 24 was tasked with designing a complete reconfiguration of the entire outside plant fiber optic and copper cabling. Of course this design was to provide for very little to no downtime!

Having served the hospital for eight years, Echo 24 had detailed knowledge of the campus and existing plant. When the Critical Care Pavilion (CCP) was built (a three story addition to the front of the hospital and completed in 2008) a four-conduit entrance facility had been installed from the CCP Main Telecom Room to a handhole in the front yard by Main Street. This was on the other side of the hospital from the proposed data center location (far north side of the hospital). Originally these four conduits were installed to facilitate a single 50 pair cable from the Local Exchange Carrier (LEC) with three of the conduits being spare / future. The reconfiguration design was to re-route all services into this entrance facility.

There already existed a five-duct bank on the west side of the hospital that ran north – south that would be utilized but the problem was it didn’t connect to the entrance facility into the CCP. Furthermore, the entrance facility terminated to a handhole that was nowhere near large enough to accommodate additional ducts and all the cabling that would be required. What was needed was an actual manhole vault. In traditional manhole construction, precast concrete is the standard.

In this situation, precast wouldn’t work because there were conduits approaching the current hand hole from three direction, all with active in-production copper and fiber optic cables that had to remain in service! Echo 24 engineered a solution to build a new manhole out of concrete block around the existing conduits and cables and hired a masonry contractor to build the 6’ x 6’ x 6.5’ deep vault that was needed to accommodate nine each 4” ducts and one 2” duct, all without disrupting service to the existing cables.

Echo 24 completed the path by installing a three-duct bank connecting the north-south duct bank using the open trench method. In addition a 2” duct had to be directional bored to the new manhole to facilitate cables from one of the outlying buildings because the cables serving it couldn’t be re-routed any other way due to the length.

On the east side of the hospital were six outlying building referred to as “Moundbuilders Doctor’s Park”. These followed a different path through two 4” ducts that Echo 24 had directional bored under the main parking lot several years prior. These ducts were also under the footprint of the hospital. The solution for these buildings was somewhat simpler. Echo 24 engineered a solution to rework one of the ducts to terminate approximately 15’ to the east and then relocate the handhole where it turns into the hospital.

While the pathway work was going on, Echo 24 had to make provisions within the hospital to route service from the CCP back to the IS Room (Main Distribution Frame for the health care system voice and data services). While there was connectivity between the two facilities, it wasn’t enough to accommodate the routing of 9 outlying buildings.

Echo 24 surveyed the telephone cable pairs and fiber strands and determined that 200 existing pairs could be re-worked to accommodate the services but 600 new pairs would have to be added. On the network side an additional 24 strands of single mode fiber would also have to be added.

With the pathways and internal cabling in place, Echo 24 was ready to move services from the 15 buildings through the pavilion. This included 28 outside plant cables with 288 strands of fiber and 1,350 copper pairs – all in service.

The plan was to methodically relocate the cables over a period of six weekends in order to minimize the downtime for each building. Echo 24 designed the weekend “cutovers” such that a manageable amount of work could be completed beginning on a Friday at 5pm and finishing on a Sunday, with service resuming on a Monday.

The first five weekends went off just as planned. It was the dead of winter and the Echo 24 crews were up to the challenge of working out in the cold snow. There was an abandoned house on the southwest corner of hospital property that Turner had used as a project office during the CCP project. Echo 24 was now using it for storage and a place to go warm up periodically. Despite all the planning and execution, the sixth weekend cut was a problem.

This was to be the biggest weekend in terms of the amount of work to be done. Six buildings at the Moundbuilders Doctor’s Park each had a 50 pair copper and a 12 strand fiber optic cable. At the time they were installed, all 12 cables were placed in one of the conduits (450’) under the parking lot leaving the other conduit empty as a spare. The plan was to pull all 12 cables out and re-route them through the empty duct that had been previously reworked to accommodate the construction.

On that cold Friday night the crews tried everything and by midnight drew the conclusion that the cables could not be removed without causing permanent damage. The weekend cutover was cancelled.

Despite this setback the project was running well ahead of schedule. Echo 24 had been communicating regularly with Turner Construction and the hospital as to its progress as all were anxious to break ground on the data center.

Echo 24 recommended a change order to the hospital to install a new 300 pair to the handhole on the other side of the parking lot and splice it to the six 50 pair cables. The handhole was not large enough to accommodate a 300 pair splice, so once again the masonry contractor (Vision Masonry) was called upon to build a new manhole out of concrete block. The hospital approved the change order and the new plan was successful.

There were five buildings on McMillen Ave who’s existing outside plant cables were not long enough to relocate into the CCP. To accommodate those buildings, all new cables were installed. The old cables were pulled and coiled at the first manhole and left there while construction took place. There were a few thousand feet of cable slack which was too much to fit in the manhole, so to protect the cables Echo 24 bought a shed from Lowe’s and placed it over the hole with a cutout in the floor for the cables to pass through. A barricade was built around the manhole opening inside the shed and it was locked up during the construction. Upon completion of the construction (and rework of the duct bank going under the data center) the cables were placed back into the IS room thus creating redundant connections for those five buildings.

With the outside plant reconfiguration completed, ground was broken on the data center. The design team came up with a 3’ raised floor design.

For Echo 24’s part, the cable tray design had been a long time coming. Back in 2007, company President Anthony Gunter, RCDD had been one of a dozen industry professionals across the US to be hand-picked by Cooper / B-Line to participate in a focus group. The group met in the St. Louis area with the purpose of assisting Cooper / B-Line in developing an underfloor cable tray product specifically for placement in data centers.

For his part and based in his previous experience, Mr. Gunter strongly recommended a system which could be independently supported and did not rely on the work of other trades in order to be installed. For anyone who has worked in data center construction, coordination of trades with all that goes into a relatively small space is often the greatest challenge. Often cable trays are designed to be attached to floor support stanchions, which then require the telecom contractor to wait for them. If the floor contractor gets behind, it affects everything the telecom contractor has to do.

When Cooper / B-Line announced the release of the F.A.S.T (Foldable, Adjustable, Stackable, Tool-less) cable support system, it was clear that the Cooper engineers took Mr. Gunter’s recommendation to heart. According to Cooper / B-Line, they had developed a product which “does not attach to the raised floor structure and can be installed either before or after floor is in place”. Echo 24 designed the cable tray system for LMH around this product and both the deployment and finished product were highly successful.

The cabling in the data center was designed around 50 micron multi-mode. Justin Sturgill, IT Manager for LMH was concerned about the real-estate fiber enclosures would consume in his cabinets. He wanted 96 LC ports in a 1U enclosure. At the time, Corning was the only known manufacturer to produce such a produce. When Echo 24 informed Hubbell Premise Wiring that they had been eliminated from consideration, it took them less than a month to come back with a product that could house 144 LC port in a 1U enclosure. Echo 24 invited Hubbell to demonstrate this product to the network group at LMH and it was agreed that the product exceeded the client’s needs at a cost that significantly less than Corning.

The fiber design to each of the network cabinets had a 24 strand multimode fiber trunk installed in one of the pathways and another 24 strand multimode trunk installed in the second pathway for redundancy to the core switches. We also installed a 48 strand multimode fiber trunk from each of the network cabinets to each of the server cabinets located in the same row, this would also serve for the redundancy since each server cabinet was served by multiple network cabinets. Each of the network cabinets had a 24 strand multimode fiber trunk installed to the other network cabinets for redundancy throughout. In all there were 74 fiber trunks installed for a total of 3,312 strands of 50 micron laser optimized fiber for the new data center.

The installation of the fiber trunks went seamless due to all the time and preparation taken with the design. Each of the fiber trunks were pre-labeled with each corresponding cabinet so there would be no confusion by the installers as to which of the trunks was for which cabinet. The installation of the fiber trunks took approximately 2 weeks. Once all the trunks were installed each fiber was tested which took approximately 4 weeks.

The inside portion of the Data Center project was completed a week early. From all perspectives, (owner, CM, and specialty trades contractor) the project was highly visible and highly successful.