Octopus Cabling | Structured Cabling, Data Cabling, Voice Cabling, Wireless Networking

Crusader Holidays

CLIENT: Crusader Holidays
BRIEF: Installation of a new UPS and Laser link for the head office of this renowned travel company

Essex based Crusader Holidays Ltd were rapidly outgrowing their current premises and were looking to acquire an additional building adjacent to their existing office. The Company already had a fully structured computer network, and in addition benefited from a full Voice over IP telephone system.

After some negotiations a suitable office was leased, some 50m from their original location. A shared car park area and vehicle access separated the two buildings.

Octopus Cabling Ltd had already carried out some minor works for Crusader and offered their services to provide a high availability, low cost link between the two premises. The challenge was to specify a link fast enough to carry both network data and VOIP telephony without resorting to highly expensive leased lines from a telecoms provider.

The solution proposed by Octopus Cabling was a Laserbit™ line-of-sight laser link running at 100mbps. This would ensure that the entire voice and data network would operate at full speed across both sites, with no bottlenecks.

Laser transmit/receive heads were mounted high on the exterior of each building and carefully aligned. The units were remotely powered via Power-over-Ethernet technology, negating the time and expense involved in installing a dedicated electrical feed to each head.

A pair of 24-port network switches, featuring QOS capability, were installed. This ensured that VOIP telephone traffic was always given precedence over data and call quality would never be compromised.

This system was installed for approximately one third of the cost - with no on going payments and superior performance - of a typical telecom providers annual leased line rental.

Additionally, Octopus Cabling equipped Crusader’s new office with 40 points of CAT5e structured cabling terminating in a suitable comms cabinet.

UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply)
Following the successful completion of a network infrastructure overhaul for Crusader Holidays, Octopus Cabling were asked to supply and install a new UPS to provide a clean, continuous power supply.

Crusaders’ systems had outgrown their original UPS performance since its installation five years ago. It was initially required to support just one small server and had recently proved insufficient to overcome a brief power outage.

With Crusader’s continuous business growth, their IT systems have also grown with the addition of items such as a large rack mount server and a VOIP rack-mounted telephone system. To cover the extra load, it was decided that rather than purchasing individual units, a larger UPS would be installed to support all of their current and future business systems.
A recent spell of bad weather had caused several power outages and a run- time of at least 45 minutes was deemed necessary to safeguard the systems during a power failure. A full audit of the equipment to be protected was carried out to ascertain their individual power requirements.

A Riello 3000VA Dialog Plus UPS with an additional battery extension tray was selected to provide the level of protection required. A rack mounted Dialog Plus Bypass Switch was also installed to enable UPS maintenance to be carried out without the need to interrupt the business systems.

During the installation, our electrical contractor installed a new 16amp power supply while our engineers installed the new units into the communications cabinet. With everything secured and connected and the cables routed and tidied, the UPS was brought into service. Some initial testing with no load proved the power supply and UPS were functioning correctly.

The computing and telephone systems were then brought back on-line. With the main server, snap server, telephone system, POE injector for the inter-office laser, two 24 port network switches and the music-on-hold CD player connected, the UPS showed a 25% load. The resulting installation will easily meet Crusaders’ requirement for backup run time, for their core systems and telephony, of around 45 minutes.

Octopus Cabling are proud to have assisted this nationally renowned local holiday company by safeguarding their business critical systems.