Sometimes, parts of a company are spun off from the parent company to become independent. This process requires the entire IT infrastructure to be separated, the data centers to be redesigned, and connected to one another. This story is about one such Herculean task, which two provider partners implemented for a corporate group: The goal was to establish two completely independent data lines (dark fiber) between two data centers. Not only was there a national border in between, but the data centers were over 150 kilometers apart.
The Key Players
The parties involved were Pan Dacom Direkt GmbH and British Telecom: Heiko Hittel and Johannes Mauch. “The result we achieved together is quite impressive,” says Johannes Mauch, Client CTO at British Telecom. “A one-stop-shop provider like Pan Dacom Direkt was a godsend for the project.” To summarize
“We’re glad to hear that. Yes, it became clear relatively quickly that what we were planning had never been done before,” adds Heiko Hittel. After all, implementing redundant routing was anything but trivial given the mix of providers. “We had to make sure that the various providers didn’t end up in the same trench,” explains Johannes Mauch. Thus, the main challenge in such large-scale projects lies in coordinating and managing all parties involved. This is primarily because dark fiber lines are rarely laid in a single continuous stretch; instead, they must first be leased from many local carriers and then connected together.
To summarize
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