Installation Profile: Extra Credit

Feb 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Gary Werner

But what about financial organizations? Think of all the financial information that is stored in databases, including credit cards, car loans, mortgages, personal loans, and business loans. Imagine if all that information were lost or could not be accessed. Isn't that information critical?

AmeriCredit thinks so. Founded in 1992, AmeriCredit is an independent middle-market auto finance company. The company works with a network of auto dealers to provide loans to consumers who typically are unable to obtain financing from traditional sources. With more than 1 million customers and over $14 billion in managed auto receivables, AmeriCredit looks to innovative technology to provide service to its customers in the United States and Canada.

AmeriCredit began operations with just one branch in Fort Worth, Texas, in the early 1990s and now operates 90 branch offices throughout North America. The company's growth and its commitment to innovation prompted the opening of an NOC in Arlington, Texas, to monitor its corporate data network.

The first control room it had was equipped with eight 27-inch computer monitors mounted on a wall. It was able to accommodate only four people, and as the company grew, more personnel were added in order to cover different aspects of the business, which required more space.

SIZE MATTERS

In 2002 AmeriCredit hired the Whitlock Group to build a control room. The Whitlock Group is a well-established A/V systems integration firm based in Richmond, Virginia, since 1955. With operations in Irving, Texas, the company designed and built sophisticated NOCs for clients ranging from Verizon Wireless to the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Account manager Craig Taylor, who specializes in control room applications, headed up the Whitlock team. Working closely with Jess Whitfield, senior network monitoring engineer for AmeriCredit, Taylor and his team developed a design to turn an old office space into an impressive control room with a distinctive “wow” factor.

The transformation began in July 2002, and the once-empty room was turned into a sophisticated NOC during the next four months. With an industrial modern design in mind for the control room, the Whitlock Group showed Whitfield several possible designs of furniture by Tresco Consoles. The company chose to have four consoles with slick curves in a black, white, and metallic gray finish similar to furniture found in AT&T's NOC.

The room has four double consoles suitable for eight IT specialists. They're laid out on two tiers with two consoles on each level. At each work space, operators are equipped with two Samsung LCD monitors on which they are able to bring up any application that is accessible on the network. They can study the network on their small computer monitors or share the information with their colleagues by displaying information on the large video wall. The operators can control the images on the screens from their desktop, making it easy to share information and gain a much larger overview of a situation.

“They wanted to be able to see a whole bunch of information at once,” says Taylor. “Some of the programs they monitor have a lot of icons, and it takes a large display to get an instant snapshot of the overall condition of the network. In the absence of a large screen display, it takes more investigation. You can't see at a glance if anything's wrong. You'd have to drill down and go across many screens.”

According to Taylor, a common mistake made when building an NOC is to try to cut costs by purchasing a cheaper projector that would be a perfect solution for a conference room but would break down quickly in a 24/7 rear-projection environment. Choosing the appropriate equipment to ensure reliability in continuous operation is essential.

The AmeriCredit video wall is composed of 12, 50-inch Christie GraphXMaster CX50-100U single-chip DLP display wall cubes, which are specifically designed for 24/7 mission critical environments. Arranged in a 2-by-6 array, the screens provide an overall image size of 60 inches in height and 240 inches in width.

Having a large display wall enables AmeriCredit to monitor the status of all of its remote servers and locations through graphic depictions on screen.

“We're spread out across the country,” Whitfield says. “The idea is to be able to get information on national events to our managers that might affect our ability to do business. If one of our branches isn't functioning, it will affect how loans are handled.”

MAKING ADJUSTMENTS

In 2001 representatives from AmeriCredit attended a control room show hosted by the Whitlock Group. They were shown various projection solutions that could be used in a network operations center, including a display wall cube. Whitfield also looked into the available display solutions before choosing to go with display wall cubes.

“We knew we wanted to go with DLP technology,” Whitfield says. “The data we display is high resolution, so we needed a display solution compatible to achieve consistently high-quality images. It also seemed to be the most effective means for our size. The cubes fit into a small area, so a dedicated room for rear projection was not required.”

All 12 of the display wall cubes are encased together in a custom-made black laminate base built by the Whitlock Group to create the appearance of a seamless video wall. Because Whitfield wanted the wall to appear completely seamless, it was important for the images onscreen to align perfectly to create the appearance of one large screen and for the seams and edges to match up perfectly. It had to be so perfect that it would be possible to run a finger along the wall and not feel any physical deviations.

The Whitlock Group built the base for the video wall and mounted all the cubes together, but the company discovered that the uneven cement floor prevented a seamless appearance. With a strong eye for detail, Whitfield could stand at the back of the room and point out imperfections in the balance of the cubes, which most people would not notice. In order to get the display wall cubes level, it was necessary to tear the wall down and redesign and rebuild the base to meet the exact specifications to achieve complete balance for the screens. In the end, the screens were mounted within half a millimeter of each other.

“We had installed the project pretty much by the end of September except for the fact that we had to reconstruct the base,” said Taylor. “The custom base had to be redesigned to provide a level and stable surface for the cubes, which took until November. Having to compensate for a concrete floor that was not level took a lot of redesign.”

The final result was an impressive screen that stands as the focal point of the room. It acts almost like a large computer monitor that can be shared by all the operators. According to Whitfield, the ability to display a high-level overview of information enables greater efficiency in problem solving.

CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM

A short distance from the NOC is the nerve center of the corporation, where 242 of the company's servers reside in one room, including 18 RISC 6000 and 4 AS/400 servers by IBM as well as approximately 220 Compaq servers of varying models. All the information on AmeriCredit's customers is stored on these servers. One of the primary responsibilities of the command center is to monitor that data center. If a problem occurs, the IT specialists will be able to pinpoint it and react quickly to restore service.

The fact that the servers are so close actually doesn't make a difference to the network.

“The servers could be in another state,” Taylor says. “It really doesn't matter to us as long as the server is accessible to the network.”

Using a Christie FRC-5000 virtual display wall controller, operators are able to access and display any application that can typically be accessed on the AmeriCredit data network. Any number of applications can be opened and displayed on the wall at one time with the ability to layer, resize, or move images on the screen based on the needs of the operators.

Redundancy and reliability were important issues to AmeriCredit in order to ensure consistent and uninterrupted system operation. The system installed in the NOC provides numerous redundancy and automatic fail-over features to prevent system interruptions.

All data transfer is managed by the FRC-5000's Ultra160 SCSI RAID controller. Redundancy array of independent disks (RAID) is a method that involves spreading information across multiple disk drives for greater redundancy, bandwidth, and recovery from hard-disk crashes. Despite information being shared among multiple drives, the computer reads the information as if it is all stored on one large drive.

The installation at AmeriCredit uses a three-drive configuration with RAID 5, the most common type of RAID. If one drive fails, the other two can reconstruct the data on a hot-swapped third drive without having to power down the controller. This prevents service interruptions from information being lost.

AmeriCredit insisted on having two controllers, though only one is used. The other is redundant, which ensures complete system reliability.

MONEY, HONEY

Budgetary constraints played a role in choosing the equipment, so the Whitlock Group reused as much of the existing equipment as it could from the original control room, including an Extron Crosspoint 12-by-8 RGBHV and stereo audio matrix routing switcher, which allows for 12 computer inputs and 8 computer outputs.

In addition to being used to display computer graphics from the network, the video wall is also used to watch television channels such as the Weather Channel and CNN in order to monitor events that could impact AmeriCredit's network and branches.

To monitor world broadcast events, the Whitlock Group installed a Crestron ST-Tune integrated AM/FM/TV tuner, which provides full control of television tuning functions. There are also JBL LSR-25 powered studio reference monitor speakers that were chosen for their high-fidelity sound quality. For presentation purposes and to review broadcast material, a JVC SVHS SR-TS1U videocassette recorder and a Sony DVP-NS400D DVD player are installed in the NOC along with two RCA DSS DRD222RD satellite receivers.

The A/V equipment is mounted on rack rails that were custom designed and built into the black video wall console by the Whitlock Group. Operators can control the equipment through a user interface on a Crestron Pro2 Integrated control system virtual touch panel. This type of remote control was chosen to provide every operator the ability to control the images on the video wall from the desktop.

In addition, a corporate boardroom is steps away from the command center. A large window faces the control room, providing an excellent view of the technology that drives AmeriCredit. The boardroom, which was furnished by the Whitlock Group, is a standalone room and is used regularly for meetings and public tours.

There's a large oval table in the center of the room where people can watch the activity in the control room, or they can watch a presentation projected onto a large 60-by-80-inch Da-Lite screen that is electrically retractable into the ceiling. The projector, a Christie LX33, is also mounted on an electrically retractable device so that when not in use, it can also be hidden from view in the ceiling.

AmeriCredit considers the boardroom and the control room to be marketing showpieces. Analysts, customers, and investors are regularly brought to Arlington in order to see the impressive command center. It has become a valuable tool for AmeriCredit in terms of providing a more effective environment to monitor the status of its network as well as to demonstrate that the company is on the leading edge of providing excellent customer service through technological innovation.

“The control room has had a positive impact on the operators being able to do their jobs,” Whitfield says. “Instead of being bound into the system and only being able to view a limited amount of information at a time, the large screen gives them a high-level overview of what's going on. They now have more flexibility to resize and rearrange images based on problems that they're working on.”

Gary Werner is senior business manager of Christie Digital Systems' advanced media display group.