Fidelity International is a world-wide leading investment provider. As part of their UK data centre consolidation strategy, Fidelity required a new Data Centre facility at its HQ facility at Tonbridge.

Spread over two underground data halls and two office floors, the project required the installation of 30,000 Cat6 copper links and 11,000 OM3 duplex fibre links to 300 Rittal cabinets and used more than 700km of cable. All links connect to a patch field of 80 x CPI patch frames, each monitored with the iPatch Intelligent patch system.

The Data Centre was cabled overhead on three levels of CPI. One of the biggest challenges faced by Able was to deliver the required high quality of cabling. To work out the optimum cable routing schemes, Able built an offsite mock-up of a row of patch frames and the associated cables. To speed up installation whilst minimising unsightly cable slack, Able single end pre-terminated all copper and fibre links. The entire installation was completed over a 14-week period.

As well as building and configuring a 40,000 port iPatch system to manage patching and monitor network devices, Able implemented additional bespoke functionality tailored to Fidelity’s requirements, including auto server provisioning.