New Weather Center Server Project

When the station was preparing to have a new news set installed, the Weather Center was a big part of the change.  The old weather center consisted of a room with a bank of monitors, keyboards and mice connected to servers and workstations in an ajoining room.  The computers sat on shelves instead of being installed in a server rack.  The first phase of this project was to design and implement a new server rack.  The existing servers were measured for the amount of rack units they were going to require, then I determined what size rack was needed and, using Microsoft Visio, created a schematic that placed each server in its new location.  As the new Weather Center was being built I took an existing closet area that had been somewhat abandoned and redesigned it to hold the Weather Center systems.  I brought in two shorter server racks and again designed where the servers would be placed.  Since this new server closet area was over 20-40 ft away from the individual stations that comprised the new Weather Center I had to run new KVM, Ethernet, and serial control cabling from the new server closet to each of the Weather Center stations using overhead wiring trays and cable management.