Datacentres sail the high seas on cruise ship

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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