Now for the wordy explanation.
Looking at the before pictures...
What a mess! Notice the lovely dual floating patch panels left by the Mediacom cable guy (imagine that, who'd believe it!). I took a close up of that one, I was shocked but not surprised.
Notice the Samsung monitor, keyboard, and mouse just strewn about. These items were left after a local IT company came in, charged a fortune, and installed the odd-shaped plywood backboard (with screws all over the place drilled into the wall, 80% of which had the screw heads beneath the surface of the wood!). They came in to install VPN router and a Dell server to host the SQL server that runs their dealership management software. The VPN function isn't being used anymore, as the other location closed and moved to this location. For a while, they had two locations operating before the "cut over."
The Dell server was mounted vertically. Why, I couldn't fathom. Those servers pull air from the front and tunnel it out the back to cool off the heat sinks on the motherboard and out the back near the power supply. With it mounted this way, all of the dust in the air settling down from the ceiling air vent was getting sucked in and caked inside over time, at a much higher pace.
Notice the old GM stock car stereo serving as a stand for a nice new TP-Link 802.11ac WiFi access point. With the stereo there, it was blocking the passive cooling capabilities of the ARRIS four port cable telephony modem.
Also notice the USB SATA back up hard drive and the nice APC BR1500G UPS, just sort of belted to lean on the wall, but still easily movable.
Before, they were using a mix of AT&T 1070 series and the RCA business system 4 line phones. Without a paging system, they were hollering "Line 1/2!" at each other from across the building. Some phones had caller ID, others did not.
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AFTER:
The hardware:
- ripped out the floating patch panels, in goes a 66 block
- punched down the needed pairs for each cable run for the drops at the far end
- labeled each cable run after tracing them with a cable toner
- removed old surface sticker mount phone and data jacks, many of which were dirty and unused, and written on many times with Sharpie--replaced them with nice four port wall drops with keystone jacks--consolidated, efficient, and nice to look at
- new plywood backboard goes in
The electronics and equipment:
- installed an 8 channel DVR security system and mounted 4 cameras around the lot and inside the building
- installed TOA BG-115 paging amplifier, with two regular Sony speakers in the sales desk area and one high power horn mounted outside on the side of the building for paging sales people out in the car lot
- installed Avaya IP Office 406, with several 6400 series Definity phones, and one 4406D+ for a testing phone
- removed the maxed out Zyxel 8 port gigabit switch, and replaced it with a 16 port D-Link gigabit switch to leave room for more devices down the road
- moved the WiFi AP out into the sales area for a better SNR and better reception out on the porch and in part of the lot--the sales people use a shared iPad with an app to appraise trade-in vehicles
The organization:
- all of the Avaya 6408D+'s got nice printed desi labels, and all of the phones except for the attendant 6416D+ have the same button programming layout, for ease of use
- all of the cable runs are labeled on the color chart--I put it there for the next tech that comes in (see previous picture above this post)
I think that's about it.
See anything I could improve next time around?
Thanks all.
Scott
