Connectivity that helps keep Bavarian citizens safe

Geiger successfully completes project with the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office (BLKA) to equip their redundant data centers with reliable, future-proof, scalable and highly available solutions to meet their current and future requirements.

The BLKA

The BLKA is the central IT authority of the Bavarian Police, with approximately 2,000 employees. It’s not only the central office for data processing and transmission, but it also provides important services such as e-mail, and telephony converge. BLKA’s data centers ensure these functions operate around the clock. Both the increasing demands on police work and the constantly changing IT and network processes require that the entire infrastructure must be reliable, future-proof, scalable, and highly available.

To equip the existing operational redundant data centers for future IT and network requirements in terms of technology, structure, availability, and reliability, the project “Restructuring DC-Whitespace” was started. Geiger supported the BLKA in this project over the entire process, from the initial idea, through to the conception and detailed planning, to the execution, including quality assurance and acceptance.

Requirements

During several workshops, the requirements of the individual departments for racks, rack equipment, patch management in the racks, power distribution units (PDUs) as well as fiber optic and CU communication cabling were developed. Geiger analyzed the existing network topology, consolidated the requirements of the various stakeholders, and created an overall DC implementation concept named “Expansion Whitespace.” This consisted of several expansion stages to ensure uninterrupted operation during the implementation. This concept was presented and approved by the various departments. The final implementation concept comprised of a consistent and redundant, application-neutral, structured communication cabling in accordance with EN50600-4. The entire cable paths, main and area distributors, including the entire communication cabling, were built in physically separated A and B structures. In addition, important distribution nodes were additionally developed by a meshed fiber optic and CU cabling. The entire newly created technical equipment and infrastructure was designed and dimensioned with expansion areas to allow flexibility to support growing requirements beyond the existing data center needs. This ensures maximum uptime, in addition to high availability and stability, is given and maintained over the service life.

Replanning existing data center

Based on the final data center implementation concept, a complete replanning of the existing data center areas was carried out. The new infrastructure had to be built in parallel with the existing infrastructure. To make this possible, the new A and B main distribution areas were created in the first stage to accommodate the future passive and active technology and infrastructure.

Geiger prepared all detailed plans and the execution, which included, among other things, DC area settlement including rack layout, cabling plans for the various cabling areas, rack settlement plans for the main area, and server racks, as well as route and label lists.

Due to the project being implemented during ongoing operations, the installation could only take place in defined sub-project stages. This ensured that the work of the Bavarian police was not affected. In close cooperation with the BLKA departments and in coordination with the commissioned specialist installer, Geiger developed a phased schedule. After successful installation, partial acceptances were carried out for the individual sub-areas and then taken over by the BLKA into productive data center operation.

To create free space for the construction of the new infrastructure, the hardware was moved to the new racks after the successful partial acceptances from the existing racks. Thus, the individual server rack rows could be rebuilt in stages. The original main distribution series was converted into a server rack series.

Good cooperation

Due to the good cooperation between the BLKA and Geiger throughout the entire project, the implementation went very smoothly. The objective of creating a reliable, future-proof, scalable and highly available data center was achieved, meeting all requirement-specific expectations. The structured cabling that has been installed has been running flawlessly since commissioning. In Geiger, BLKA has found a local and experienced partner that can provide a leading portfolio of data center solutions and fiber optic and CU communication cabling. Following the completion of this project, Geiger is continuing to provide support to the BLKA on current and planned projects.