To accommodate growth and future expansion we recently began construction of a second data centre at our Osborne Park premises. It is now very close to completion and I thought there might be some interest in a few pictures of our latest data centre.

Our Osborne Park premises are currently connected by a dark fibre ring back to our other WA infrastructure at the QV1 building and the Central Park building.

Firstly here is some quick information on the new room….

• 40m2 raised floor computer room
• CAT6 cabling throughout
• Redundant Liebert PeX air conditioning units
• Liebert Nx Series UPS with dedicated standby generator (auto start on mains failure)
• Laser VESDA (Very Early Smoke Detection Apparatus)
• FM200 Fire Suppression Gas

…and here are the pictures:

Raised Floor Prior to Cabling

Main Patching Frame

Cat 6 Cabling Beneath Raised Floor

Cat 6 Cabling to Rack

Air Conditioning System

FM200 Fire Suppression Gas

VESDA (Very Early Smoke Detection Apparatus) Control Panel

View of Data Centre from Workstation Area

Liebert Nx Series UPS and Associated Battery Cabinet

We are currently making preparations to release a Westnet Wiki as a future replacement to our current Help section. We have tried various forms of Help/FAQ pages on our website over the last decade but have found it difficult to create a navigation structure that everyone finds easy. The amount of content that can be provided is also limited by the resources that we have available so only the most important articles end up being created.

Wiki will be a fantastic solution to both of these problems in my opinion. Due to its high placement in most search engine results and huge amount of content, more and more people are becoming familiar with the main Wikipedia site. What I am really excited about though is that it opens up the possibility of Westnet members and the general public (eg modem vendors, enthusiasts of particular software applications etc) contributing articles. There is a huge amount of knowledge out there that we could not possibly turn into articles ourselves. I really think that people will be pretty enthusiastic about sharing that knowledge.

We have been using a Wiki for our internal knowledge base for quite a while now and it has been a huge success. Staff have contributed nearly 900 articles covering everything from how to tweak the MTU on a Mac to how to join the Westnet MySpace group:)

As always, I am interested to hear any thoughts you might have on this topic.