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Ask Slashdot: What Would You Include In a New Building?
First time accepted submitter weiserfireman writes "For the first time in our company's 60 year history, we are going to be building a new facility from scratch. We are a CNC Machine shop with 40 employees and 20 CNC machines, crammed into a 12,000 sq foot building. We are going to build a new 30,000 sq foot building. I am the only IT person. I support all the computer systems, as well as all the fire/security/phone systems. My Boss has asked for my input on what infrastructure to include in the new building to support current and future technology. 1st on my list is a telecommunications equipment room. Our current building doesn't have one. I have been researching this topic on the Internet, and I have a list of a lot of different things, all of them are nice, but I know I am going to have a limited budget. If you were in my shoes, what priorities what features would you design into the building?"
Secret passageways
Perhaps this is obvious, but its the very first thing that popped into my head. You might not need to install a lot of cabling to run what you have, relatively speaking, but you WILL need to install more later and you WILL wish you had installed bigger conduit. So, plan your current needs as being 1/3 to 1/2 capacity and leave plenty of room for more. It doesn't cost much more to install bigger/more conduit now, but it will cost TONS more to install it later. Your successors will praise you.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
Run away from "The Wireless Future" as fast as you can. Pull cable to everything that isn't moving and has an ethernet port
Rule number one: Don't skimp on network drops. It's easier and cheaper to install them when you're building/finishing a facility than to try to go back later and re-run extra data lines. Ideally, plan twice as many as you think you need. Barring that, drop at least one more than you think you need in each location. The spare can be used for when you buy new equipment, add a printer, phone, etc..
Fire related equipment should be on its own separate network. Not a VLAN, it's own actual network. I've seen facilities grow, that were small in the beginning and ran fire on the same physical network as regular data. Regular data needs grew, and despite QoS settings, the fire system started getting starved for network traffic and the fire controllers were reading that they list contact with remote sensors, which triggers an alarm. Once the link is re-established a few seconds later, the alarm resets. Then a little later, you get another false alarm because it missed a check-in from a sensor.
Be generous with power drops. CNC equipment will likely need their own power, but be thoughtful about where you'll have power for various printers or workstations, anything that might need a dedicated circuit, in case a CNC were to cause a circuit breaker to trip. When you have a Server/Telecomm room, make sure it's big enough to suppor both the network rack, a telecom rack and a server rack or two. Check and double-check that you have dedicated circuits to the room for each rack you're planning to run.
Be generous with air flow in the Server/Telecomm room. It will generate more heat than you expect. Plan on it having its own, dedicated AC system.
Backup Power, plan to have it. If your phones are IP-based, you want to be able to have power for them during an outage, as well as your fire system. An onsite backup generator would be very nice. If you can't swing that, be sure to have, check, test and keep working, a good set of UPS devices to provide power during an outage.
I know you have a limited budget, but shoot for the moon, don't cut corners where you don't have to. Doing it right will serve the organization for years to come, even after you retire or move on...or have to hire more IT folks!
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
Unless you are in a wildly electrically hostile environment
He's in a machine shop. Only thing worse is a arc welding plant. Do yourself a favor and run fiber to every machine, not every desktop. In ye olden days at the plant I had to run that new-fangled cat-5 thru roof trusses spaced many feet between power conduits just to keep interference down. We didn't even bother trying to set up a networked PC in the welding area. All that plant cat-5 was replaced with fiber as budget permitted. Assuming you terminate your own SC/ST (or whatever) connectors, the main cost is a couple hundred bucks for the ethernet to fiber converters.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Somebody's going to mod me down, but I'm dead serious. This is the second time a company I worked for has moved to a new location with no storage space for anything at all -- HR documents, financial documents, machinery (both active and surplus), office supplies, even employee's coats. Let me assure you how professional it looks to have random file cabinets placed all over what are supposed to be ADA-compliant-width hallways. </sarc>
I've been down this road a few times - install separate ductwork leading in and out of the server/telco room (with the intakes on the opposite side of the building from your other ductwork) if you can possibly afford it.
Dirt and machine oil and metal filings can move surprising distances. Separate HVAC to the server room works far better than extra filters which just get clogged.
Also, like others have said - conduit for data lines to every workstation. Potentially cheaper than fiber (if you do it right the first time) and more durable and future-proof.
Please for the love of do not have it be part of the building AC especially in a machine shop. You have solvents, grease, lubricant, metal bits etc in that shop air. Building AC is not designed to run in winter (assuming you don't live where AC is required year round). The split systems are an easy install and only run a few k at the low end. Do make sure there is nothing going through the roof or carrying liquids above the room. Do try and get it on an exterior wall and have backup fans installed though the wall a couple hundred bucks of fan can cool the room well enough when the AC is broken. Depending on the type of machines you expect long term fiber is always a good thing immune to EMI from plasma cutters and the like. Good door locks that log per person to the security system is a good idea same with camera's.
No sir I dont like it.
I do infrastructure for a large organization.
You need:
Telecommunications closets within 250' of every edge of the building where there is any possibility that equipment could be placed, as total cable length can be 328', and you have to account for patch cables and workstation/equipment cables, as well as elevation changes and routing. These TCs need their own air conditioning independent of the rest of the building and need to be keyed so that only a very select group of staff can go in. Do not use wall-mount enclosures if you can avoid it. Run conditioned power to the TCs. It's your call if you have battery backups in each TC or a big one at the supply for them, but electrically isolate them from the floor. Probably a good idea to have the AC units on a battery backup too.
Conduit, Conduit, Conduit. Color code it and label it. For trunk runs have at least two sets, one for copper, one for fiber, and just do them in 4". For distribution, don't go smaller than 1", and probably still best to have two runs. Remember, no low voltage and high voltage in the same conduit, and best practice to not put fiber and copper in the same conduit in order to protect the fiber as changes are necessary.
Talk to the designer for equipment layout. You'll want to put junction boxes wherever you'll need to bring conduit down from the ceiling, even if they're just plugged at the moment. You can add the drop and outlet later, but if you don't put the jbox in, it's a big PITA.
You do not need to string all of the cable for all of the conduit up front, but you should run at least a twelve-strand fiber between all of your TCs, and probably run one of each of single mode and multi mode. You should probably also run a 25 pair copper for phones.
You should look into STP or S/FTP instead of UTP for the copper. Learn how to ground it right and make sure that the contractors follow the specs. Do not use Cat5e, use at least 6, preferably 6a. Commscope makes a thin 6a if you're worried about bend radii and number of cables in a conduit.
When you're installing conduit, allow for a few places for later expansion for wireless. It may sound strange, but leaving a double-gang box with a reducer and a metal plate at the end of a short 1" conduit stubbing off of your trunk can be handy if down the road it's needed.
Pay attention to grounding and bonding.
Devise a labelling scheme. We use MDF as A, IDFs B - whatever. Then patch panel position number, then type. So, A-021D would be an ethernet (data) port, 21st on the patch panel, in the MDF. B-047V would be a phone (voice) port, 47th pair, in IDF-B. You could use F for fiber, or if running single and multi mode, S or M.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
> Do yourself a favor and run fiber to every machine, not every desktop
Could you please elaborate on this? How would you get fiber to every machine?
The machines out on the factory floor pretty much have to run aerial along the roof trusses because in a big enough plant there are machines in the middle of the factory floor and buried conduit would fill with nasties like water and machine coolant. So you're juggling space with the power and often compressed air from the ceiling.
The desktops don't matter because they're on the same probably fairly clean AC power line with the same ground point and probably low neutral currents. So just wire like any old cubie-land. The machines out on the floor, however, do not have such clean power and they really need fiber.
As for getting the fiber to each machine, my advice is innerduct it. Well, run the numbers first. At one time it was cheaper to buy tough innerduct and wimpy indoor fiber, than it was to buy tough outdoor rated fiber and skip the duct. Maybe not now. As for the machine itself that was handled by plant maintenance... tell them to mount a small rack enclosure on the headstock side of the 80 foot lathe or the 20x20 plasma table control station or whatever and they'd just do it for me / us. The original poster is probably going to be stuck doing this by himself. This is sometimes challenging to not get in the way or create an osha violation somehow (you're blocking access to the first aid kit! You need 4 feet wide walkways in case the fire dept needs the jaws of life! etc)
Whatever you do, lock your stuff on the floor or every time the plasma cutter pops a breaker they're going to write in a procedure for minimum wage drones to reboot your stuff or otherwise mess around with it, if they can get access to it "just in case". Or they'll start storing their lunch in the cabinet or whatever and attract mice. Or they'll leave the door open and a passing forklift will rip the whole box off the milling center (whooops). Don't need fancy milspec locks just keep the casual interloper out.
Maybe the TLDR is just parallel the air line and power line installation?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I will offer this caveat: If you are interviewing for a junior position at a law firm and they advertise an on site health club for their employees, run like hell. It means they'll be expecting you to work (very) long hours and keep a few changes of clothes on site.
Have gnu, will travel.