TV’s night of nights got the Event Systems treatment this year with the supply of network infrastructure for the Lighting department. Using a combination of Cisco small business series switches from Resolution X, and Catalyst 2960’s from Event Systems, a fully redundant gigabit network was installed to transport lighting control from FOH to Stage. 4 Pandoras Box media servers and 3 Mbox media servers were controlled through the network allowing media to be transferred from the managers at FOH to racks quickly.
The network also took care of transporting both MA NET and ARTNET traffic from the control consoles at FOH to Artnet nodes distributed through the Crown Palladium roof and stage. Console traffic was separated into areas through the use of VLANS allowing only the correct traffic to reach each node, therefore reducing any imposed delay through broadcast storms caused by the protocol itself.
In total 5 VLANS were imposed on the network which ran in a ring fashion. Traffic destined only for the stage was balanced onto a more direct path than that destined for the roof nodes, while still having full fault tolerance in case of link failure. Control traffic for the media servers was passed only along the 2 gbps ether-channel link between FOH and Racks.
The entire setup was monitored for link throughput and failure using SNMP so that issues could be resolved early on in the production. The setup reduced the amount of cabling that would have otherwise been needed, while still providing a reliable and fault tolerant network.
Client: GTV 9 Melbourne
Crew: Andrew Hebblethwaite
