The right cure for cable management: retail chain designs data center for ease of use and growth potential - Infrastructure

Communications News,  July, 2003  by Carol Everett Oliver

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The term "vitamin shop" may conjure up images of a "mom-and-pop" shop filled with hundreds of home remedies, but Vitamin Shoppe Industries is, in reality, a sophisticated operation that is rapidly expanding throughout the nation. What began in 1977 as a single store in New York City has evolved into 136 stores in 16 states, offering in excess of 25,000 items from more than 300 brand names, as well as its own product line.

"With thousands of products running through our system, we pride ourselves on our newly installed, highly efficient networking operations," states Mike Morris, chief information officer for Vitamin Shoppe.

In order to improve inventory management and product distribution, Vitamin Shoppe recently collapsed four locations into one 240,000-square-foot warehouse and office headquarters in North Bergen, N.J., tripling its previous capacity. In doing so, the company centralized its corporate processing hub for all merchandising and distribution fulfillment.

The heart of the networking system is a 2,500-square-foot data center that contains the company's main cross-connect (MC) for all services required by its internal office data and voice operations, a warehouse conveyor system, and various manufacturers or service providers that co-host their cabinets and servers on site. The data center handles a myriad of applications--everything from accounting to inventory planning for all stores, fulfillment of online orders, and the company's catalog business and call center.

FLEXIBILITY AND ORGANIZATION

"The key to the success was the selection of cable-management products and pathways," notes Peter Martin, a consultant and senior project manager for Constantin Walsh-Lowe who designed the layout. "I wanted to ensure that the infrastructure would be flexible and adaptable to any networking equipment, while remaining organized for any future moves, adds or changes."

After Vitamin Shoppe gutted the interior of an existing warehouse, Martin, Morris and Mike Provost, manager of technical services, designed the data center and the telecom closets for maximum utilization of space. The facility is divided into seven zones connected through a redundant fiber-optic backbone back to the MC in the data center. The offices are in two zones on two floors and are serviced by two communications cabinets, or ICs. The five zones of the warehouse include a multilevel conveyor system with five column-mounted ICs.

The data center was built on a 16-inch raised floor to allow sufficient space under the floor for cable trays, power distribution and adequate air flow to equipment racks and cabinets. The data center accommodates seven rows, with the capacity of 11 cabinets in each row, and the main distribution frame to house patch panels for data and voice connectivity, as well as networking hardware.

Approximately 500,000 feet of Berk-Tek LANmark-1000 Category 6 cable runs through the cable tray underneath the data center floor as part of the total one million feet of cable that was pulled throughout the facility.

Ortronics Mighty Mo 3 cable-management racks with 16.5-inch side rails are used to house equipment such as network switches and routers, as well as additional Mighty Mo 3 racks with 6.5-inch side panels for the patch panels for all networking connectivity.

"The racks, with vertical cable-management channels and 2-U Ortronics horizontal cable managers between patch panels, were used to keep the patch cords organized," explains Richard Imparato, president of Bullet Communications, South Hackensack, N.J., the firm awarded the installation contract. The cable-management rack is designed to accommodate a large volume of cables and patch cords, while still keeping everything organized.

PLENTY OF GROWTH POTENTIAL

The main distribution frames are divided into "pods," a grouping of three racks. The center rack houses incoming services; the others contain Ortronics' Clarity 48-port patch panels for connectivity to equipment rows. The front of each rack can hold up to 10 48-port patch panels, with 480 station cables per rack, or 960 cables within one pod supporting up to 40 cabinets. The two pods in the data center could eventually support 160 cabinets using the front and back of the racks.

"To account for manufacturers' equipment that would not fit in a standard cabinet, we configured three rows with Ortronics MUTOA Mac-Paks, which were temporarily placed under the raised floor," states Martin. Eight station cables were pulled from a pod to each Mac-Pak.

Berk-Tek LANmark-350 Category 5e was selected for horizontal cabling. Berk-Tek LANmark-1000 Category 6 cables were recommended for the data center connectivity, since they can handle the increased bandwidth and speeds for customers' evolving applications. All four pairs of the Category 6 and Category 5e cables in the MC and ICs are punched down in the Ortronics Clarity 24- or 48-port patch panels for maximum cable connectivity.

"Because the patch panels are available in either six- or eight-port configurations, this allows the flexibility to support the workstation grouping of four TracJacks on the eight-port configuration and the Clarity 110 blocks on the six-port configuration," states Martin. "This logical jack layout in the patch panels makes the data frame easy to read."