International cabling specialist Brand-Rex has appointed Isaac Garson as its new global business development manager.

Garson joins the Fife-based company with a remit to extend its global reach, using his in-depth knowledge of the software and cabling market to develop new business opportunities as well as ensuring current customers continue to be well served.

The appointment follows February’s announcement that the company had been bought out by the existing management team and international private equity giants Murray Capital. The deal, worth almost £30 million, also bought the business back to its roots in Scotland.

Chief executive Paul Lines explains: “Isaac’s appointment brings new business expertise to the company at a very important time for Brand-Rex. With new investment and an ambitious growth strategy in place, being able to call on such a wealth of experience will prove vital as we push ahead with plans to be a £100 million business by 2010.”

Garson has a solid background in intelligent infrastructure, having spent eight years with RiT Technologies, helping to penetrate major Fortune 500 accounts as well as establishing their IIMS solution as a market leader.

“My key role will be to develop stronger end-user and consultant relationships at a global level,” explains Garson, who will be visiting customers on a global basis. “But I’ll also be helping the sales teams to develop a stronger solutions-based focus, and ensuring that we build on the success that we’ve already made in markets across the world.”

Brand-Rex employs 390 people at its sites in Scotland, England and within its global sales offices.  The data communications business, based at Glenrothes in Scotland, supplies high performance cabling systems to support IT networks for a variety of market sectors including finance, government and education.  A facility at Leigh in Lancashire supports the company’s speciality cables business, supplying niche cables for automotive, rail, aerospace and defence applications.  Much of Brand-Rex’s sales are exported and the company has representative offices throughout Europe, the Middle East and South East Asia. For more information visit www.brand-rex.com or call 01592 772124

Brand-Rex is pleased to today announce the appointment of Seamus Ryan to the role of Global Sales Director (Datacom & Speciality).

Seamus is a hugely respected leader within our market sector having previously served as Managing Director of Anixter Europe.

Brand-Rex CEO, Paul Lines comments “I am delighted that someone of Seamus’ stature in the industry has decided to join us.  This appointment will further underpin our strategy to become the Market Leader in Europe.”

Seamus Ryan adds “Brand Rex has a strong reputation as a blue chip organisation.  This, along with the company’s continued investment in people, products, territories and service has been the paramount reasons for joining.  I am extremely excited to be able to play an integral part in the continuing success story of Brand-Rex.”

Seamus will commence his new role on 21 April and hopes to meet many of the company’s customers during the first few months.

With 60,000 outlets across campuses as far afield as Charing Cross, South Kensington and Harrow and with 60 plus building and refurbishment projects on the go – all needing network modifications, Imperial College has decided to standardise on Brand-Rex copper and fibre for their network. Linda More went along to find out why, when structured cabling is supposed to be interchangeable, they would decide on a single manufacturer only.

Ranked as the fifth best university in the world and the third in Europe, Imperial College London is a science-based institution with a reputation for excellence in teaching and research. Over 100 years old, Imperial College attracts over 12,000 full time students from 123 countries who attend the 235 taught courses across its nine London campuses. Having established its prominence in life sciences and biomedicine, Imperial College established the first academic health science centre in the country following the merger in October 2007 of St Mary’s and Hammersmith Hospitals to form the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust which integrated with the College.

Technology plays an important part in the teaching and research activities of the College, as well as being vital for the day-to-day administration and smooth running of the organisation. With some 60,000 outlet points available, more than 20,000 live connections are made each day into the two central data centres. “In addition to providing access and connectivity for our staff, students and administrators, the College also hosts and manages internet connectivity for forty other organisations including the nearby Science Museum and the Natural History Museum,”  says Antonio Barbosa, Network Infrastructure Manager at Imperial College.

With a major programme of refurbishment and upgrade planned throughout the College, valued at in excess of £100 million per year over the next five years, Barbosa and his team have extensive infrastructure work to plan, design and install.

"Computers are now a vital part of the College with a lot of the scientific modelling work requiring high speed, high availability and being completely dependent on a mission critical network," says Barbosa. "Imperial has become a flagship site for the rest of the universities within the UK, and it's essential that we get it right."

As with most Universities, the IT network had grown organically over many years as the vast collection of buildings had grown and their uses changed over Imperial’s impressive 100 year history.

As Barbosa explained, “this organic network development – common throughout both academia and industry – was fine in its time. Now, however, with ICT being a critical operational resource rather than the background tool that it was in previous times we needed to implement a far more strategic approach to this mission-critical infrastructure in order to give bandwidth-hungry research and academic users the 24*7*265 service essential to their experiments and studies.

Historically, ICT has not been part of the planning process of new buildings nor indeed refurbishments. Barbosa promoted the thinking that the ICT infrastructure should be though of in exactly the same way as ‘utilities’ like electricity, water, gas and drainage – all of which are planned in at the architect’s initial building design stage. This is a philosophy which Imperial now enthusiastically applies and which is already paying dividends.

When the College implemented Prince2 project management methodologies Barbosa’s team and the Estates team, which manages the refurbishment and building programmes, were able to collaborate on revising the role of stakeholders to better represent the network user ‘clients’. As a result, all College projects now specify infrastructure service requirements from the outset. The result is that no new project can be contemplated without taking the network infrastructure requirements into consideration first - a major step forward. As a result, Barbosa and his team now have a full overview of all of the College’s building and refurbishment projects that have network infrastructure implications. At the time of writing there are an amazing 60 such projects underway.

Imperial College has grown up over the years and now boasts nine campus sites across London and the South East ranging from Charing Cross to its central campus in South Kensington and North to Harrow.   "Not only do we have the challenge of routing cabling around some very old buildings, but we also have issues with legacy and inherited installations," says Barbosa.

Even new buildings have not been without their problems for Barbosa and his team. The network installed by the builders and its contractors in a prestigious new South Kensington building that was to be used to house visiting lecturers was found to be causing problems. As Barbosa and his colleagues discovered, "the builder’s contractors, when installing the cable, had completely disregarded the 90m maximum length specification and gone far beyond that with the result that the channels didn’t work. Therefore when a distinguished guest was having problems we had to come up with a solution fast." With no time to call back the builders to painstakingly measure and re-route cables Barbosa and his team decided that the quickest solution was to implement a wireless network to cover the penthouse suites. "The network is something that is completely overlooked, until it's not there," says Barbosa. "And only then do people realise exactly how much they have come to depend on it."

The majority of cable installed in recent years had been Brand-Rex, but Barbosa and his team decided that a review was necessary and appropriate. 

For technical reasons – particularly to avoid potential difficulties with mixing cable brands and for the operational reason that it is far easier and also cheaper to only have to support a single make of cabling technology – Barbosa wanted to establish a single make of structured cabling for both copper and fibre. He also strongly believed that The College would benefit from standardising because this would then allow the network team to establish a direct relationship with the manufacturer giving them access to the highest levels of technical support and advice. It would also make The College a significant customer for that manufacturer and enable it to influence future developments such as the date-stamped cable he wished to be able to install.

Since then Barbosa and his team have developed a complete set of standards for infrastructure at Imperial which has helped to improve communication and consistency between all parties. "The comprehensive standards document specifies that only Brand-Rex copper and fibre cabling products are to be used and tells internal and external people everything they need to know about Imperial infrastructure requirements. Now it is also a requirement on new-build projects that the builder must use one of Imperial’s roster of approved cabling installation contractors and only the specified cabling manufacturer’s products." says Barbosa. "So now there can never again be the excuse that they couldn't get hold of someone from this department to give them advice or guidance because the College network standards policy is clearly documented. And it’s available to them online."

Part of the challenge within Imperial College is the sheer size of the establishment. There are two data centres, numerous smaller comms rooms still exist from the time when each department ran its own network. "We have approximately 400 locations scattered throughout the College which contain networking equipment of some sort in them -- switches, routers, even servers," says Barbosa. "One of our main tasks is to significantly reduce the number to a more manageable level by bringing the equipment together into a smaller number of larger areas." This strategy will not only increase overall reliability, it will decrease the cost of maintenance and also improve manageability and security of the network.

Not only do Barbosa and his team have an extensive 60,000 outlet fixed infrastructure to support, Imperial College also boasts one of the largest wireless infrastructures in the country with some 500 wireless access points that allow students with laptops to work and study in any of the public places within the College buildings. That’s excluding the halls of residence which are due to have wireless installed next year.
Standardised Solution
Currently the College has standardised on providing full duplex 100Mb/s Ethernet to every desktop, with the capability to provide 1Gb/s where required for more demanding scientific applications. The College backbone uses Cisco routers and 3Com and Cisco switches with diverse-routed multiple 10Gb/s links between them for added resilience. Two 2.5 Gb/sec links into the education and research JANET London Metropolitan Area Network provide resilient access and these are soon to be upgraded to 10Gb/s. "Communication is the lifeblood of the university so it's important that our links are resilient and have sufficient bandwidth for the traffic we generate," says Barbosa. “For example Imperial’s professor Tejinder Virdee is leading the biggest experiment on earth with the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) particle detector, which has already created a very impressive and continuous daily flow of data. [see box out]

Within the next year or two Imperial College plans to further upgrade the network active infrastructure to support 1Gb/s at the desktop with 2Gb/s and 4Gb/s aggregated links at the core. "This configuration will give us high availability in the network, and in planning it we are being proactive rather than reactive while introducing an element of future proofing," says Barbosa. "Although PCs are unable to realistically take advantage of these network speeds at this time, we can see a steady increase in their power, and in the near future they will get to the point of being able to use this bandwidth."

In order to consolidate and co-ordinate the infrastructure further, Imperial College has standardised on the use of Brand-Rex structured cabling using four Brand-Rex trained installers to assure the quality of installation. "Although we have standardised on one manufacturer, we will continue to buy through a tendering process between the preferred installers. The cabling they supply though has to be that which is being specially manufactured for us by Brand-Rex."

Recognising that the College is a significant customer, Brand-Rex has created fibre and copper cables specifically for Imperial College with the words Imperial College and the year of installation printed along their length for easy identification. These new cables will help Imperial's engineers now and in years to come. For example they will be able to immediately identify cabling which has been put in according to our new standards and legacy links which have not.

"Being able to see the year of installation at a glance will make troubleshooting problems easier,” says Barbosa. “In addition, when planning for refurbishment and replacement, spotting cables of a specific age will help us identify when a cable may be approaching the end of its viable life and need replacing."

Asked why Imperial opted for a single manufacturer standard, he explained, “There are massive benefits, both tangible and intangible because this arrangement gives us a direct relationship with the Manufacturer and to their technical experts whenever we need it. They not only discuss their forward development plans with us but they actively court our input and as a result we can influence the course of their development which is to Imperial’s significant advantage.

“We’re already benefited because as part of our move to reduce the number of comms rooms we decided to go against the conventional wisdom of OM3 multi-mode fibre for backbone with OS1 single-mode for only the long campus runs – and use only OS1 single-mode because standardisation gives us much greater efficiency and flexibility. As a result Brand-Rex is already developing new OS1 products to support us. You simply wouldn’t get that sort of support if you just bought lots of different products for each section of the network.

Summing up, Barbosa said, “Of course products from different manufacturers ought to work OK with each other but to be honest, as long as you chose one of the top brands, it’s not the technology that’s the main issue in a major network, it’s the level of technical and operational support that is the key to success..”

Cabling solutions manufacturer and developer Brand-Rex and Carillion IT Services (formerly Alfred McAlpine - IT Services), announce that they have been selected to provide the fibre communications infrastructure network for two new aircraft carriers commissioned by the MOD.

This prestigious contract is part of a multi-billion pound programme that will see a new class of aircraft carrier to be operated by the Royal Navy and a step change in the UK’s Carrier Strike capability. The fibre network will provide the basis for all IP based requirements on the two ships, creating a flexible and robust primary communications system capable of delivering the needs of these sophisticated new vessels.

Brand-Rex was selected by the Aircraft Carrier Alliance (ACA) from a short list of five manufacturers. The company will be using its market leading Air Blown Fibre system, Blolite+, a unique installation solution that offers flexible and cost effective deployment with an ability to easily support future network expansion requirements.  Brand-Rex has chosen to work with long standing partner Carillion IT Services (formerly Alfred McAlpine - IT Services), who will provide project management and installation services.

The two new vessels will each be built in five sectional modules which will see  specialised, recently developed 3mm Blolite+ Microduct installed to carry the fibre. The Blolite+ system uses a compressed air installation method and is capable of blowing single coated fibres up to 300 metres through the tortuous route of bends and twists that you might expect with the aircraft carriers. The fibre units are only blown into the ducts as they are needed, allowing the Blolite+ system to develop as network needs expand.  The use of this system has removed the need to use a traditional “dark fibre” philosophy to address future proofing, and also enables a more efficient Shipbuild plan as the Microduct can be installed on individual modules; This ‘pay as you grow’ approach represents excellent operational value for the MoD, and illustrates some of the many benefits of blown fibre networks.

Noel McNulty, Managing Director of Carillion IT Services said that, “An 18 month design phase, aimed at de-risking the project, would commence almost immediately.” Highlighting the strength of the partnership with Brand-Rex, McNulty added, “The combination of our vast experience with this technology, having been a Brand-Rex partner for over 15 years, and proven ability in the defence sector will benefit us to meet the challenges of this strategic project - the biggest British military ships ever built.”

Blown fibre was selected at an early stage by ACA as it was the only technology capable of meeting its exacting demands. Frank Ward, regional sales manager of Brand-Rex, said that this marine, hi-tech environment was inherently ‘noisy’ and that signal integrity could not be maintained with copper cabling. Additionally, the signals carried in fibre are very secure, a key requirement within any MOD communication system.

The Blolite+ system provides substantial flexibility and significant ‘future-proofing’, allowing newer technology fibres to be blown in without the normal upheaval that installation of new cabling would bring. Additionally Brand-Rex will provide training for Royal Navy personnel to have the capability to blow fibre in an operational theatre, allowing new fibre to be added to the network and damage control to take place without the reliance on a third party back at dock.

Paul Lines, CEO of Brand Rex said that he was “delighted with the award of this contract and beyond the obvious kudos it would serve as an excellent illustration of the many benefits blown fibre offers for new network installations across all industry sectors”. He added, “These vessels are built with an expected 50 year operational life span and the network has to be able to anticipate future needs and support new innovations as they come on stream. The Blolite+ solution will achieve this.”

The ACA selection process was, according to Noel McNulty, “Targeted directly at fibre manufacturers as opposed to integrators.” Frank Ward added, “Brand-Rex went to considerable lengths to prove that we could meet ACA’s requirements if they selected the innovative Blolite+ solution.” Adding that, “this was made all the more challenging as the ACA needed to achieve a high level of confidence as the large scale deployment of this technology supporting the majority of ship wide networks is novel in a UK Warship”. Part of the Brand-Rex response was to build a demonstration system that replicated the range of bends and arduous routes; ACA witnessed the fibre being blown and Brand-Rex was able to prove that it was fit for purpose. The appointment of Brand-Rex’s trusted partner Carillion IT Services enhances the years of close co-operation the two organisations have had.

The contract was signed by Paul Lines, CEO of Brand-Rex and Rear Admiral Bob Love, the CVF Integrated Project Team Leader, at ACA headquarters in Farnborough. 

It was as a result of Britain's Strategic Defence review (SDR) in 1998 that plans were announced to replace the current set of three Invincible Class 22,000t escort carriers with two larger, more capable Future Aircraft Carrier (CVF) ships that could operate a more powerful force and will operate as a joint-service platform, for all three services (Navy, RAF, and Army) in a variety of roles.

Concluding, Frank Ward said, “The Royal Navy required a secure and future proof network technology and that is what Blolite+ delivers.”