The Background
Opening its doors in 2016, The Bartlett is a 699-unit, 23-story luxury apartment building located in the Pentagon City neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia. Offering residents all the conveniences of urban living, the property boasts over 40,000 square feet of amenity space, including a lobby with 24-hour concierge; a fitness lounge and main fitness center with a group exercise studio; an entertainment space with TV-lined walls, foosball, shuffleboard, and billiards; an indoor/outdoor terrace bar and rooftop lounge; a rooftop pool and sundeck; a courtyard with dog parks; and more.
Installed by integrator Nard’s Entertainment, the massive AV system spanning these spaces consists of 27 displays — including an eight-panel video wall in the pub room — playing out content from DirecTV receivers, Blu-ray players, Apple TVs, TransitBoxes, and components hooked up to local HDMI and VGA inputs in the conference rooms. 140 speakers pump out audio from network amplifiers in full CD-quality audio. 15 touchscreen controllers are located throughout the building, including a master controller at the concierge desk.
The Challenge
To limit the need for staff interaction with the AV system, its day-to-day operation is completely automated via a URC control system. For example, smooth jazz begins to play over the lobby speakers at five every morning and all displays are automatically switched to sporting events in the afternoon. In addition, the system is controlled, monitored, and serviced remotely. In the planning stages, Nard’s Entertainment knew a reliable, scalable, and resilient IP network would be required for automation and offsite management. To provide it, the company turned to Luxul.
The Solution
“In any system, networking is the backbone that holds everything together, so reliability is key,” said John Carroll, project manager at Nard’s Entertainment. “Luxul is an easy choice to meet this need; it’s products are rock-solid and simply don’t fail.”
At The Bartlett, the all-Luxul network includes one AV Series AMS-4424P managed switch with Gigabit RJ-45 PoE+ ports and 10 Gigabit SFP+ stacking ports; seven 26-port AMS-2616P Gigabit managed switches featuring 16 PoE+ ports each; and two AGS-1008 AV Series 8-port Gigabit switches. For network routing functionality, Luxul’s AV Series ABR-4400 multi-WAN Gigabit router was used, which allows for up to 512 concurrent device routing entries. The network is fiber-connected between seven full 42-RU equipment racks, which allowed Nard’s Entertainment to deploy the system one area at a time instead of all at once, which was essential in a project of this size and scope.
The Results
“The Luxul system has been running 24 hours a day, seven days a week for two years without incident,” adds Carroll.
PRODUCT AT WORK: Luxul ABR 4400
This AV Series Multi-WAN Gigabit Router (ABR-4400) provides an optimal platform for setting up a residential or commercial network. Rear panel ports and front facing LEDs (user selectable blue/green colors) for clean integration with AV rack systems. Up to 512 concurrent device routing entries, with an intuitive interface including management, as well as firewall, QoS, VLAN, VPN and other scalability and security capabilities.
