06 July 2020 Woodside Office relocation “WHQ”
Feb-Dec 2018
In late 2017 Woodside Energy (Australia’s largest natural gas producer) began detailed planning for an IT and networking uplift from their long-term home on St Georges Tce, Perth to a new state-of-the-art headquarters building. As part of the process to re-establish their presence in a new location with zero business disruption, Pathfinder Technology Group was engaged as a specialist cabling contractor. Pathfinder was given responsibility to participate in the planning of the redeployment of networking and IT infrastructure devices as well as the actual setup and reconnection of devices.
As a subcontractor to Vocus Communications, Pathfinder technicians also performed lead-in cable installations and splicing works to establish dark fibre links between the new Woodside building and the off-site data centre location.
As part of the overall plan, Woodside undertook to relocate some systems to an off-site location at a time well in advance of the date of the formal transition from the old building to the new. Pathfinder supplied and installed structured optical fibre and copper cabling at that location as well as services to install and connect relocated devices such as network switches, servers and storage arrays.
During the period of the formal transition, we provided a large team of technicians to perform 12 planned, synchronised week-end work campaigns of cabling and patching work to bring the various systems on-line with no disruption to the business. Some campaigns involved simultaneous work at multiple locations and all campaigns involved working with Woodside’s principal IT contractor, Cope (specialist sensitive equipment transport), Dell EMC, Cisco as well as the Woodside IT and Networking groups. All 12 campaigns were completed within the intended outage windows with all systems being returned to service by the principal IT contractor as planned.
All of the single mode and multimode optical fibre and copper patch cords were procured from Pathfinder for this important project, including vendor specific cabling and cabling accessories.
After the completion of the move, Pathfinder assisted in the final exit from the old data centre with decommissioning tasks including removal and disposal of cabling and racks.