With an ever-increasing dependency on high-quality communications, coupled with the continuous drive for more sophisticated technology, the high levels of functionality that were previously only available to large corporations are now readily available to considerably smaller organisations.
As a direct consequence, alongside the cabling infrastructure, we have often been asked to provide the active network hardware to enable the final end-to-end solution, Affinity Water being just one of a number of examples. Whilst we do not have any formal in-house accreditation for undertaking such work, we frequently supply and install the requested equipment, whilst working in tandem with the customer’s people with respect to connection, commissioning and testing. Unless our customers specify otherwise, the equipment we typically offer for this service is either Cisco or HP.
Also, with the demands for network availability constantly increasing (as more and more WiFi, CCTV, voice-over-IP, access control, EPOS tills, etc, are being supported via our customers’ structured cabling networks) the need for uninterrupted power supplies (UPS) is very much becoming the norm. On those occasions when we are asked to supply and install such equipment (eg, the Cumberland Hotel) our preferred supplier is the world-renowned APC.
We also often install SNMP management cards within the ‘smart’ UPS, whereby the customer can then manage the UPS themselves and address any associated alerts.
