Department of Defence Network Upgrade

VRT has recently completed a major upgrade of the ESN (Engineering Services Network) at the Department of Defence's Enoggera Barracks in Brisbane. The upgraded system has survived the past summer with virtually no downtime, including the extremely severe storm that devastated The Gap-Enoggera area in mid November last year.

This fibre optic network supports such services as energy metering, security systems, BMS and Fire Protection Systems.

It was originally built in a bus topology and utilised some commercial class electronics components installed in outdoor enclosures.

The overall reliability of the network was inadequate for some of the applications. VRT was chosen to design and implement the upgrade to a fault tolerant ring topology with UPS capability based on industrial grade components. Covering 32 nodes around an 8km ring, the foundations now also exist to add a sophisticated network management system at a future date. The major componentry in the upgrade included Moxa Nport 5250, 2 Port Serial to Ethernet Servers and EDS 508A Managed Ethernet Switches with self-healing capacity.