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As our staff increased, space to house our people and equipment was always a concern. We doubled our office size by acquiring an additional office in our previous building, but that meant splitting the office into two sections. Since we were essentially "landlocked" by other tenants without the opportunity to expand our current space, we began a search for a new office. Luckily for us, we were able to procure a new space only 100 yards from our previous location, making the move pretty painless - at least as painless as having to pick up every single bit of all of your earthly possessions and moving them to a new location without losing or damaging anything could be.
Our current office is over double our previous size and has a much more efficient office layout. The new space offers the opportunity to grow our staff even more as well as segment the office for specific projects. According to Chris Herzog, President of STG, "We often have the need to restrict access to certain equipment due to non-disclosure provisions; we are typically working with products long before their release so we need to help our customers maintain the secrecy of their product plans. The new space has the flexibility to easily accomodate those sorts of projects." .
The new facility also offers enough room for a dedicated area to support our in-house development and testing systems. "Most of the UNIX and Windows servers will be in a single location rather than spread throughout the office, which will make much of the computing infrastructure easier to administer and maintain," said John Gleeson, whose responsibilities include managing STG's computing resources.
At STG, we believe in making investments to do things right. The single biggest investment we focused on in the new office is the network infrastructure.
As STG has grown, our network has grown in size and capacity in a very ad hoc manner. We ended up with cables in walls, cables running in surface tracks, and even cables stretched across the floors. While the basic network worked fine to support our normal development and administrative functions, it wasn't flexible enough to accomodate some of the more advanced development, testing, and performance work we found ourselves doing. You can't do decent high load testing if you end up interfering with everyone else on your local segment, and you can't do reasonable performance testing if you can't control your network's behavior. This pretty much screamed out that we need to make a major investment to install a network that would be able to grow with us into the future.
With these problems in mind, we sat down and worked out some of the features of our ideal network:
Total flexibility in configuration of ad hoc networks without having to run new cables
Multiple drops to each desktop to allow connectivity to several physically distinct networks
A centralized facility able to bring whatever sort of connectivity a person needs to their desktop, all over the installed physical network infrastructure:
Current Ethernet 10mps & 100 mps technology plus higher speeds in the future
A direct phone line (POTS)
Access to the in-house PBX
Serial connectivity
Other types of connectivity we haven't even thought of
Support for future networking technologies and speeds
Taking advantage of state-of-the-art networking technologies, the team from Data Cable Services was able to design and install a 100+Mbs network infrastructure to take care of all of our data needs. With 4 drops to each desktop, each developer has access to tons of network throughput. Using a centralized network switching and patching facility, the network can be configured to support normal development activities or we can easily create specific and unique network configurations for testing and performance measurement purposes without impacting the main network. When all was said and done, over one and one half miles of cable was installed in our new facility!
Our goal was to allow quick and reliable configuration of the network to
accommodate our expected growth as well as our diverse development and
testing needs. The new network will eliminate the lugging of heavy equipment
from office to office and/or the need to use parts of the main office
network. No matter what sort of connection needs a project has, this network
is tough enough to handle it. According to Jerry Scannell of Data Cable
Services, "This is one of the most flexible networks we've ever installed."
In addition to serving as the central networking hub, the Computer Center serves as a home for many of STG's systems as well as customer equipment used for specific projects. The Computing Center includes many features to make our lives easier:
A separate high-capacity electrical breaker panel dedicated to the support of STG's computing equipment which is distinct from the existing office service.
A dedicated AC unit to help keep everything at a comfortable temperature.
Easier administration and maintenance of servers and other critical systems by co-locating important systems together.
By grouping the servers together, they are able to share high speed switched backbones to move data between themselves at a high rate of speed without impacting any of the other network segments in the office.
