High density infrastructure gets Morrisons' green light

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: High density infrastructure gets Morrisons' green light.

Brand-Rex has announced that it is the chosen supplier for the high speed copper and fibre infrastructure underpinning supermarket giant Morrisons' data centre expansion at its Bradford headquarters. The state-of-the-art structured cabling system designed and installed by Express Data, supports over 420 Morrisons' stores and the nine million customers who pass through its doors each week.

"The data centre expansion for Morrisons is a prestigious and forward looking project employing the latest design for high capacity, high speed infrastructure in an energy efficient manner," says Chris Davies, UK Sales Director, Brand-Rex. "We are delighted that Brand-Rex high density copper and fibre infrastructure products were chosen for their technical merits, demonstrating our commitment to quality, reliability and stringent environmental standards."

Augmenting Morrisons' existing data centre and disaster recovery services, the expanded facility is part of the continued development of the UK's fourth largest food retailer and its commitment to improving environmental efficiency and reducing power consumption. Planned with optimum performance and minimum environmental impact in mind, the expanded data centre has standardised on Brand-Rex products for all its fibre and copper infrastructure requirements. "Using copper and fibre high density solutions Express Data is able to deliver an elegant ergonomic solution that reduces floor space requirements while managing a high volume of optical connectivity leading to significant cost savings," says Kevin Forrest, director at installers Express Data.

Employing front access, high density frames, cabinets and management panels with integrated fibre cassettes, cables and sophisticated patch cord management, the High Density Patching system is a compact solution for handling high volumes of optical connectivity.

More than 36,000 linear metres of Brand Rex Blolite air blown fibre optic cable will be installed. Providing in excess of 1,000 fibre optic terminations, the fibre infrastructure will create a high capacity, high speed backbone throughout the data centre. Additional fibre links to the headquarters' main network infrastructure are also planned to give optimum network resilience and multiple traffic routing options.

The small, light and easy to install Brand-Rex 10GPlus Zone copper cable was chosen for its flexibility and space saving abilities as well as its high performance. "By creating more room in server cabinets and under-floor cabling trays, the Brand-Rex Zone cable improves air flow thus reducing cooling costs and power consumption," says Forrest. "In addition, its 10Gb capacity offers Morrisons further future proofing." Over 17,000 metres of Brand-Rex cable will be deployed providing 432 copper links.

With energy efficiency in mind Express Data has incorporated water chilled racks, and a sophisticated environmental monitoring system together with an integrated networked CCTV system for both security and monitoring purposes into the high performance and future proofed infrastructure. When complete the expanded data centre aims to achieve a Power Usage Effectiveness (PuE) rating of around 1.4, considerably lower than the industry average of between 2.0 and 2.2.

"Our 10GPlus system combined with a Blolite backbone offers Morrisons the power and performance it needs today, while the forward looking fibre infrastructure design will enable migration to 40 or even 100 Gigabit Ethernet standards in the future," says Davies. "The Morrisons data centre will lead the way in energy and performance efficiency and we are delighted that our Brand-Rex integrated fibre and copper infrastructure will contribute to its success."