Racks support call-center project - Company Operations

Communications News, Nov, 2000 by Barbara A. Lopez

Facility designed as showcase from raised floor up.

Based on anticipated traffic levels, Verizon (formed by the merger of GTE and Bell Atlantic) knew its planned Coeur d' Alene, ID, call center would be both large and complicated. Specs called for scores of servers, a switched Gigabit Ethernet hub connecting the database to 450 client work-stations on the call-center floor, and a huge PBX switch to handle the call center's internal traffic. By design, the majority of the data equipment had to be housed within a single room--and all of it had to operate at Telecordia reliability levels, a standard far beyond what is expected of most data centers.

Fortunately, Verizon was not obliged to put the project out to bid. The company had the full internal resources to undertake the entire job virtually in-house. The only outside assistance requested or required was from Chatsworth Products Inc. (CPI), Chatsworth, CA, which matched its racks to Verizon's equipment needs and arrived at an overall configuration that made best use of the available space, totally eliminated exposed cable runs--an absolute Verizon requirement--and strictly adhered to company safety guidelines.

Verizon has plenty of internal expertise when it comes to connectivity. That expertise had largely gone to waste, however, with the coming of the networked office. Verizon continued to sell countless large business telephone systems, but the data networks that ran parallel with them were left to others. Thus, it decided to consolidate both telephone and data cabling in one sale and persuade the customer that Verizon workmanship in telephone-cabling installation was just as applicable to the data side.

So, Verizon formed the Structured Cabling Group under its Network Services Division. The Coeur d' Alene call center, completed in four months, was intended to showcase the abilities of the new department.

SERVES NORTHWEST U.S. MARKET

The call center--one of four national open market centers (NOMCs)--was designed to serve Verizon's business customers for the entire northwestern region of the U.S. within the competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) market. It would handle incoming customer queries, complaints and orders. Its staff needed instant access to millions of customer records and profiles accumulated by Verizon's Network Services, as well as to sophisticated customer relationship management software used to expedite service requests.

The center also had to have dedicated high-speed communication with other Verizon electronic data repositories elsewhere in the U.S., and with parallel internal networks providing data backup and operational redundancy. In addition, the center needed nearly all of the capabilities of a local exchange central office because of the huge volume of calls that it would handle on a 24x7 basis. Since the CLEC market is exploding, the four NOMCs are of great strategic importance to the company's long-term business plan. The centers provide a focus for resale of Verizon products and services. Because the customer base consists of other telecommunication companies that must provide high levels of service as a matter of survival, the execution of the design for the data equipment room, or main crossconnect (MC) room, had to be flawless.

The MC room occupies the entire mezzanine level of the office building housing the call center. While Verizon felt it could easily handle equipment selection and configuration for the MC room, it sought CPI's expertise for housing the equipment.

"We designed the rack system for the room using our own proprietary auto-CAD system," recalls John Novak, CPI sales manager and project consultant who worked closely with CPI's authorized distributor in the area. "I'd say the cable runs were the biggest challenge. Two of the seven racks support nothing but patch panels. And, at the time it was designed, switched Gigabit Ethernet was just coming in. The raised floor requirement added a further degree of complexity as well. Back then, raised floor installations appeared to be on the way out, though now they're coming back."

The raised floor apparently presented the only really sticky installation problem, says Jeff Collet, lead technician for Verizon. "It had to do with the earthquake bracing. The CPI braces we got had to be modified to fit in the space below the floor."

A DETAILED INSTALLATION

Because of the earthquake code, space was restricted for both the cable-management system and the bracing. The restriction is one of the reasons the MC room looks so clean. The bases of each of the racks had to drop through the raised floor to the slab, where they are secured. The bottom shelf of each rack is level with the raised floor, and the special bracing is virtually unnoticeable.

Verizon installed 300,000 feet of structured cabling in the building, with each workstation receiving 622 Mbps via a quad of CAT 5 cabling. "We used a total of six Fast Ethernet switches with 48 ports apiece," notes Dan Fleming, technical specialist for data services and the supervisor for the cable installation. "These were interspersed amidst Lucent Patchmax 48-port patch panels. Underneath each switch, we placed a high-density 24-port patch panel that went right back to the punch panels. A short cross connect went from there to the workstations."