Dark Fibre Africa (DFA), founded in 2007, is an open access, carrier neutral dark fibre provider to all licensed entities. It currently has more than 6000 km of duct route installed across South Africa.
Local electronic research and development house Keystone Electronic Solutions has been awarded the contract to provide its Remote Site Monitor solution for all DFA monitoring facilities in order to provide proactive monitoring of the cable on DFA’s new generation networks (NGN).
Jacques van Loggerenberg, DFA technical executive, comments: “DFA has a build, own and maintain model whereby it is responsible for deploying the fibre infrastructure, for our clients to light up. The initial build was focused around metro build in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban.
“We then completed two long haul links from Mtunzini to Pretoria and Cape Town to Yzerfontein. We now cover all three international cable landing stations through Mtunzini (EASSy, Seacom and SAFE), Melkbos Strand (SAT2, SAT3 and SAFE) and Yzerfontein (WACS).
“Last year we initiated an NGN project where we evaluated all the existing building blocks we were deploying on the network. The project was part of the DFA Total Quality Management Programme (TQM) whereby products get evaluated on a continuous basis to ensure that the best product is used for immediate and future requirements.
“One of the new building blocks identified in this process was the need for a Primary Cross Connect (PCC) facility. The purpose of the primary cross connect is to partition and provide flexible connectivity between the metro core network and the long haul fibre network.”
He continues: “These PCC nodes will be housed in containers or building locations, and will cater for up to 4320 fibre connections at a single node. These facilities will also be used to house the remote testing units (RTUs) which are used for proactive monitoring of the DFA fibre cables.
“Because monitoring and security are of the utmost importance to DFA it was decided that we required a remote site monitoring solution for the PCC sites. Although we had used monitoring equipment before, we needed to integrate the best product for our specific requirements on this project.
“We developed a list of requirements, and together with an external consultant for objectivity, we eventually shortlisted three products, one of which was the Remote Site Monitor developed locally by Keystone. We installed the products in a test environment in one of the facilities, and then began stringent testing,” he explains.
One of the criteria was fast and efficient local support, and so the consultant requested changes and additions to the functionality on a regular basis, in order to assess how the companies would handle rapid and diverse changes. Keystone was able to turn around most of the changes within 6-8 hours.
The findings of the testing were documented and evaluated according to the predetermined criteria. Keystone scored the highest and was selected to provide its monitoring solution for the DFA PCC monitoring facilities rollout. In fact, the Keystone test site was able to go live onto the network immediately as the first monitored facility.
John Eigelaar, Keystone technical director, explains the solution: “The Remote Site Monitor consists of modular rack-mounted hardware as well as a server-based management platform that can be accessed remotely through a web-based interface. The geo-referenced interface plots each facility’s location and status on a map of South Africa, and immediately reflects any critical change in the status of the facility on the icon on the map.”
For the DFA installations, the RSM monitors access, power and environmental factors such as air temperature, movement and humidity. This enables DFA to have full monitoring capability to all its PCC facilities.
Says van Loggerenberg: “One of the advantages of the Keystone solution was that it easily integrated with our existing network software. We had used Keystone previously to provide other network management solutions, so it was really just a case of expanding the functionality of the existing network software.
“Another bonus was that unlike other products, Keystone was able to provide us with only those modules that we required. Other products came as a bundled package, so would have cost a lot more, and come with a range of features we did not require. And additionally, we have confidence that Keystone can develop modules for any future requirements that we may have, making it totally scalable,” he concludes.
For more information contact Keystone Electronic Solutions, +27 (0)12 460 4135, [email protected], www.kses.net
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