The Australian oil and gas exploration and production company, Santos, is in the top 50 listed Australian companies. Its operations span countries including Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam, India, Kyrgyzstan and Egypt, as well as on and off shore Australia. In Australia, Santos is the largest domestic gas producer, supplying sales gas to all mainland states and territories, ethane to Sydney and oil and liquids to domestic and international customers. The centre of the company's global organisation is a new, purpose-built headquarters in the Adelaide CBD.
When planning this key facility, Santos had to have a state-of-the-art communications infrastructure. Its voice and data network had to support end-to-end 1 Gbps connections to 5000 outlets, with scope for an upgrade to 10 Gbps transmission speeds in the future. At the same time, the network had to run reliably with minimum down time and operating costs.
To meet these tough requirements, Santos chose structured cabling from CommScope, including the Systimax VisiPatch 360 System and the Systimax GigaSPEEDX10D Solution. Developed at CommScope labs, these solutions optimise all aspects of cabling design to give maximum performance and minimum running costs.
"We wanted a cabling infrastructure with performance that could comfortably support network intensive oil and gas industry applications - both now and into the future," said Garry Rowe, team leader, IT operation at Santos.
"The applications supported by our cabling, including VoIP telephony, can generate high peaks in network traffic. So we needed infrastructure that helps ensure fast response from all our systems when the network is very heavily loaded."
Santos awarded the design and project management of its new HQ to Bassett Consulting. In turn, Basset worked with TAF and Associates, a Systimax prestige business partner, to provide the network infrastructure. The cabling contract was won by TAF and Associates in an open tender against competition from other vendors. The decision to use Systimax cabling was based on a scoring system awarding points for key features of the competing solutions. Cabling performance, the installer, the proposed infrastructure design and guarantees were all carefully evaluated.
Systimax Solutions and TAF and Associates were rated highly in all the key categories and had the best overall score. They proposed a network linking a central computer room on the building's first floor to two separate floor distributors on each of its other 11 levels. In the computer room, more than 30 cabinets containing switches and servers are interlinked using a cross connect design using VisiPatch 360 patching hardware. This gives a high level of flexibility, allowing new cabinets to be added and commissioned with minimum disruption to network services.
Choosing the new VisiPatch 360 System gives Santos some important benefits. It delivers best-in-class transmission performance supporting both 10 Gbps and 1 Gbps ethernet applications. Its compact, ergonomic design also saves valuable space with a high density of easily accessible ports. The VisiPatch reverse patching technology is combined with integrated horizontal and vertical cable and patch cord management. This routes cords back into channels below the connectors, avoiding the traditional patch cord 'spaghetti'.
Connectors are unobstructed, so labelling is easily visible and re-patching is quick, simple and less prone to error.
"VisiPatch is the first really efficient, elegant solution for network patching - the panels look efficient and are efficient to use," said Rowe.
"They save time and errors in the re-patching process and, used with the cross connect arrangement, they allow us to add new services with minimum down time."
From the computer room, backbones and risers connect with the floor distributors. These 10 Gbps connections use Systimax GigaSPEED X10D copper and LazrSPEED fibre cables. At the floor distributors, an interconnect design with GigaSPEED X10D angled patch panels is used to connect 400 outlets on each level. Cabling is carried from the distributors via overhead trays to ceiling-mounted multi user telecommunication outlets located throughout work areas. Installation of the system was completed as part of the AU$40 million new building's fit-out over the course of four months. To complete the work against a tight and carefully coordinated schedule, TAF and Associates deployed a team of up to 15 certified Systimax installers.
The network configuration they implemented gives total redundancy with dual networks. The central communications room is linked to each floor via 12-core LazrSPEED fibre cable, and the floor distributors are connected together via copper and fibre connections. In total, 250 kilometres of GigaSPEED X10D copper cable and two kilometres of 12 core LazrSPEED fibre are used in the Santos network. The complete installation is covered by the Systimax SCS 20-Year Extended Product Warranty and Applications Assurance. Backed by extensive testing of end-to-end connections at CommScope labs, these warranties and assurances were a key factor in Santos choosing Systimax cabling.
Commenting on the project, Reginald Evans, regional director from Systimax Solutions in Australia, said, "Systems in the global oil and gas industry can put very heavy loads on network infrastructure, so Santos wanted the best available cabling solutions. Through our new 360°C perspective on cabling design, we could offer them the combination of high performance and overall efficiency they wanted. And we could back this up with industry leading guarantees."
