Case Study

North Shore Life Sciences Company Gets a Much-Needed Data Closet Makeover

The Situation

A life sciences company, located north of Boston, has counted on KTS for a wide variety of services over the years. KTS was in the midst of working on several infrastructure projects when they discovered the poor state of one of the data centers. The chaos, jumble of cords and lack of labels identifying ports and cords left by previous contractors was a concern (see picture 1). A chaotic data center makes repairs more time-consuming than necessary and, with nothing labeled, there is a high possibility of pulling the wrong cord and shutting down the wrong thing. KTS brought the data center issue to the attention of the life sciences company and recommended that KTS fix the problem while they were on site. The company agreed that KTS should go ahead and get it into shape.

The Work

The data center is the hub for all communication connectivity throughout the buildings on this campus. To avoid any disruption to operations, the work was carefully planned and sequenced to occur over a weekend.

The data center, where all the patching needed to be done, is contained in two cabinets limiting this to a one-person job due to space constraints. KTS has a team member who, in addition to his other skills, excels at data centers and data closet organization, so he was tapped for the job. Pete started work on a Saturday morning at 6:00 am, finished up at midnight, and returned on Sunday from 6:00 am until early afternoon.

The work included organizing all of the patch cords in the data center (over 400 patch cords) and labeling all wires and their corresponding ports, installing wire managers and creating detailed IP and port-specific documentation.

Challenges

Interruption of the connections made in the data center would impact every area of the building, so the work had to be completed during off hours on the weekend. During this time the entire building was down including security cameras and alarms to protect scientific samples.

As a result, the security team walked the floors every two hours over the course of the weekend, verifying building security and manually checking refrigerator temperatures to ensure that ongoing lab research was not adversely affected while temperature alarms were disabled.

Benefits/Impact

With the data center organized, labeled and documented (see photo 2), it is unlikely that someone will accidentally pull out a port and inadvertently take something down. Additionally, repairs, changes and adjustments can be completed quickly and easily without having to sort through a jumbled mess of wires to determine the correct port to access. It’s a win for IT and everyone who works in this life sciences building – even for those who may be unaware of how vital the data center is to their day-to-day work.