Datacentres sail the high seas on cruise ship

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Celebrity Equinox cruise ship

Given the sheer scale of cruise ship the Celebrity Equinox — 17 decks high and 317m long — it's understandable that it has to be able to offer some serious IT infrastructure to meet the tech needs of up to 2,852 passengers.

For a start, Celebrity Equinox, built in 2009 for Celebrity Cruises at the Meyer Werft shipyard in the German North Sea port of Papenburg, has three datacentres, 1,600 Mac Minis, 1,350 Apple TVs, 967 hotspots and a high-performance network. Ensuring all that equipment works is the job of an IT department of seven, run by infrastructure and operations manager Marc de Lange.

De Lange has two staff permanently deployed to the ship's internet café, aiding passengers with run-of-the-mill helpdesk issues such as logins and user training. The other four IT pros work full time on maintaining Celebrity Equinox's systems.

Working patterns for the ship's IT team differ from those habitually found on dry land. Tech staff work seven days a week, and an average of 10 to 14 hours a day throughout their four-month contracts. However, shore leave between contracts is about two months.

Published: July 25, 2011 -- 10:28 GMT (03:28 PDT)
Photo by: Meyer Werft

Caption by: Joachim Kaufmann
Rittal server racks

Two Rittal server racks house standard HP blades and NetApp storage in the Celebrity Equinox's 50-square-metre main datacentre, located in the middle of the ship where movement is relatively low even in heavy seas.

The ship's IT backbone is a Cisco IOS Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) network, which carries all the data from the networked computers on board, as well for telephony, TV, camera surveillance, point-of-sale systems and cashless gaming machines.

Published: July 25, 2011 -- 10:28 GMT (03:28 PDT)
Photo by: Joachim Kaufmann/ZDNet Germany

Caption by: Joachim Kaufmann
Along with the HP blades and NetApp storage, the water-cooled main datacentre also contains the ship's IP telephone system, seen here, which serves the 3,300 wired and 400 wireless IP phones found onboard the Celebrity Equinox.

Published: July 25, 2011 -- 10:28 GMT (03:28 PDT)
Photo by: Joachim Kaufmann/ZDNet Germany

Caption by: Joachim Kaufmann
Second datacentre

The Celebrity Equinox's second datacentre, seen here, is located one deck above the main one. This facility is half the size of the main datacentre and contains only a single rack of servers. It is designed to act as a backup in the case of problems in the main datacentre.

However, in the two years since the commissioning of the Celebrity Equinox, the backup facility has yet to be called into service. There's no automatic failover, and de Lange's IT team monitor all the systems from a central control room.

Published: July 25, 2011 -- 10:28 GMT (03:28 PDT)
Photo by: Joachim Kaufmann/ZDNet Germany

Caption by: Joachim Kaufmann
Third datacentre

All the ship's audio and video applications are handled in the Celebrity Equinox's third datacentre, seen here. This facility converts incoming satellite TV signals into IP streams and stores all the videos and music that passengers can access through their cabin TVs.

Each of the cruise ship's 1,426 cabins and suites has at least one full-HD flat-screen TV. A program developed by US firm Nanonation allows passengers to choose from about 20 TV stations, hundreds of pieces of music, as well as free and paid video. Each TV is controlled by its own Mac Mini, which can also be used for room service, shore bookings and surfing the internet.

The third datacentre also contains some Macs, which are used to create the cruise director's daily video about activities available onboard.

Published: July 25, 2011 -- 10:28 GMT (03:28 PDT)
Photo by: Joachim Kaufmann/ZDNet Germany

Caption by: Joachim Kaufmann
Back-end system with Xserve hardware

The back-end of the cabin TV and entertainment system, which is housed in the third datacentre, consists of Apple's now-discontinued Xserve hardware, shown above.

Published: July 25, 2011 -- 10:28 GMT (03:28 PDT)
Photo by: Joachim Kaufmann/ZDNet Germany

Caption by: Joachim Kaufmann
Celebrity Equinox's bridge

Many IT-based systems are also in use on the Celebrity Equinox's bridge, shown here. But for safety and security reasons all the ship's navigation and control systems are kept physically separate from the facilities that fall under de Lange's remit.

This story originally appeared as IT- und TK-Systeme auf der Celebrity Equinox on ZDNet Germany.

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Published: July 25, 2011 -- 10:28 GMT (03:28 PDT)
Photo by: Joachim Kaufmann/ZDNet Germany

Caption by: Joachim Kaufmann

The Celebrity Equinox cruise ship has three datacentres serving 17 decks, 1,600 Mac Minis and up to 2,852 passengers

Celebrity Equinox cruise ship

Given the sheer scale of cruise ship the Celebrity Equinox — 17 decks high and 317m long — it's understandable that it has to be able to offer some serious IT infrastructure to meet the tech needs of up to 2,852 passengers.

For a start, Celebrity Equinox, built in 2009 for Celebrity Cruises at the Meyer Werft shipyard in the German North Sea port of Papenburg, has three datacentres, 1,600 Mac Minis, 1,350 Apple TVs, 967 hotspots and a high-performance network. Ensuring all that equipment works is the job of an IT department of seven, run by infrastructure and operations manager Marc de Lange.

De Lange has two staff permanently deployed to the ship's internet café, aiding passengers with run-of-the-mill helpdesk issues such as logins and user training. The other four IT pros work full time on maintaining Celebrity Equinox's systems.

Working patterns for the ship's IT team differ from those habitually found on dry land. Tech staff work seven days a week, and an average of 10 to 14 hours a day throughout their four-month contracts. However, shore leave between contracts is about two months.

Published: July 25, 2011 -- 10:28 GMT (03:28 PDT)

Caption by: Joachim Kaufmann

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