Tampere is one of the biggest cities in Finland. The city's IT center (previously located in four different places) has recently been moved to the new 'Info House'. The place is the most modern in the area and the Black Box Octet was chosen to manage the hundreds of servers.

400 Servers, 15.000 users, more than 100 terrabytes of hard drives and a 24/7 service level. Those are some of the key figures of the Tampere city IT center.
The whole system is located in two server rooms, 2.500 square feet each. Both rooms have their own data communication- and UPS rooms. The rooms have two separate climate control systems, a third one is kept in reserve as a back up. An Argon extinguisher protects against fire hazards, in case of power failure a 1.5 megawatt aggregate is available.
The building itself is so sturdy that the server room in the basement wouldn't be damaged even if the whole building would fall down on it.

Many operating systems
The IT Center is owned by the Tampere City Council and offers IT services to different city units and health centers in the area. These services include both network- and operational services, together with technical support and solution services. These specific clients require a 24/7 service support level.
The IT Center employs approximately 160 people.

"Our network reaches all around the city and surrounding areas, geographically speaking we operate in a large area", says Markku Vaarankorpi, Operations Manager of the IT Center. "In our former server room we worked with an older, analog (Black Box) console system. When we moved to the new location last summer we obtained a digital system.
Each one of the current (two) server rooms are two workstations and there are three work stations in the operating room at the second floor. This way we can limit the number of people that have to access the server rooms. There are approximately 300 servers connected to the Black Box system, both with graphic and alpha numeric user interfaces," points Mr. Vaarankopri out.
"Our operating systems are Windows, Linux, AIX, TRU64, Solaris and Open VMS. All of them work very well in the same Black Box area. Using seven consoles we can manage all servers. Each console gives access to all of the servers (one of our requirements) and each of the four operators can (depending on their password) access the servers they are responsible for through the console menu.

We selected the best!
"Moving the system was easy", continues Mr. Vaarankorpi. "We installed the new Cat5 cabling ourselves, and used different colours for the console cables. The Black Box system is very flexible and allows configuration even before the servers are installed. We only had to unplug the servers from the old location and move them to the new place. However, the whole change of location took up eight weekends!"
We used the old Black Box system since the turn of the millennium and it operated without problems. The large number of cables would have been problematic on the new location. The operating distance of the old system was also somewhat limited. With the new system we can send a 1600x1200 pixel image up to a distance of 1.000 feet.

Half a day of training was all we needed to learn working with the new system. This training included both the use and configuration of the system. The menu based operation is very logical, two of our employees are responsible for the operation and maintenance of the system. They are quite busy, because the number of servers increases with approximately 50 servers every year."

"The system functions very well", praises Mr Vaarankorpi. "Black Box offers 24 hours / 7 days a week support, but we didn't needed it yet. Our questions are answered promptly, the level of expertise is excellent. We needed a few additional components, we received them very quickly, most of them even the next day! The Black Box octet is, technically speaking the best we could find, and we are very happy with our choice for Black Box".