On Sunday 7th April, Crown Casino held the 55th TV Week Logie Awards. Event Systems was invited again to provide the core lighting and media server network.
Rohan Thornton from Firelight Lighting Design runs a tight ship with high expectations as to the reliability of all equipment used in the production system. To meet these expectations of reliability and performance, Event Systems deployed its fleet of Cisco switches and Mikrotik routing products. The entire network was built around a ring topology to ensure that no one component failure will affect more than a local segment of the network. Interlinked with copper cabling through the roof sections and then via fibre from stage to FOH because of the distance, the core system was set up with about an hour of being onsite.
With any system, an effective monitoring solution is the key to stable operation. Event Systems provided end point monitoring with ICINGA and Latency measurement and graphing with Smokeping. A Dell R710 provided the virtualization platform to run Windows server 2012 with Hyper-V supporting the individual Linux platforms. Internet connectivity for FOH was provided by Crown Casino and supplied through the same infrastructure to users at FOH. At the core of the network was a Mikrotik rb2011uas-rm router. Cost effective and reliable, the Mikrotik router provided firewalling between individual control networks while still enabling a single monitoring platform to monitor the individual components such as control consoles and Artnet nodes.
Media content for the onstage and in-room LED screens was rendered mostly onsite. The integration of creative provided computers with the critical production network was made easy using the routing capabilities in the core. Using the firewall and routed nature of the design allowed trusted and un-trusted section of the network to coexist without much concern of reliability issues.
UPS’s were provided for each section of the network including supply of a 3000VA ups for control at FOH. Monitoring via ICINGA provided early warning of any power issues throughout the system.
Equipment used:
- 1x Dell R710 Server 2012
- 1x Mikrotik RB2011UAS-RM
- 2x Cisco SG300-28P
- 2x Cisco Catalyst 2960
- 4x Netgear GS108T
- 4x Mikrotik RB750UP
- 1x Mikrotik RB951-2n
- 1x Eaton 5PX 1500VA UPS
- 4x Eaton 3s 500VA UPS
- 1x APC SmartUPS 3000
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