DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE AWARD 2019 CASE STUDY

darmstadtium

INTRODUCTION

Darmstadtium was the overall winner of the 2019 INCON Digital Infrastructure Award, a position it first achieved back in 2014, the inaugural year of the competition. This best practice case study provides details on how Darmstadtium was selected to win the 2019 award with a focus on the following distinguishing features:

Exceptional digital infrastructure coupled with state of the art meeting facility
Evolving, unique information technology systems
A convention centre focused on connectivity, innovation and research

“We look forward to being your guest again…”

The darmstadtium team often hears this sentence from its customers. It’s clear that it doesn’t refer just to the location, but also to the entire team. After all, what would a facility like darmstadtium be without a dedicated team?

DARMSTADTIUM’S KEY FACTS

Darmstadtium is an outstanding and state of the art meeting facility, 20 minutes away from the International Airport Frankfurt – within the metropolitan region Frankfurt Rhine/Main, Germany.

Opening: 6 December 2007
Idea, planning and construction supported by TU Darmstadt, the city of Darmstadt and its government
The architects: Talik Chalabi and Paul Schröder (fs-architekten)
It is named after the chemical element darmstadtium (Ds110), which was discovered in 1994 at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt
The names of the rooms are also taken from or inspired by the periodic table of the elements
The first DGNB-certified congress centre (“German Sustainable Building Council” – Deutsche Gesellschaft für Nachhaltiges Bauen e.V.)
First place in the “Office and Environment” competition organised by B.A.U.M. e.V. in 2014 and third place in 2019 (in the “Companies with up to 500 employees” category)

Operated by a team of 38 permanent employees, scores of freelancers and fulltime inhouse ICT experts

**26 rooms, 21 conference rooms and further foyer areas**

A restaurant with 80 seats on ground floor & 40 in a wine bar on upper level

**A Roof garden which offers up to 200 guests an impressive view over the City of Science Darmstadt**

11 years of darmstadtium: 9,500 of CO2 saved, more than 3,500 events, more than 1.6 million visitors out

Underground car park with 454 parking spaces

DARMSTADTIUM’S KEY FEATURES

Darmstadtium is forging a trail as a pioneer of the megatrend of connectivity in the events sector, with constant evolution like the virtualization of servers and did just realise a complete redesign of the network structure.

The redesign was managed in cooperation with Cisco Systems with the aim of developing a more reactive and agile network. Individual care and first-class support provided by the in-house ICT specialists mean that darmstadtium is very well placed to host ambitious user conferences.

No need to rent hardware, no time-consuming set-up, cabling and dismantling work – clients and delegates alike arrive and can immediately log into a functional, fast and secure network.

In cooperation with Darmstadt University of Technology, Darmstadtium provides an internet connection of up to 20 GB/s, as of 2019 that is the world’s fastes internet backbone possible.

STATE OF THE ART EVENTS

Examples of innovative and extensive use of our infrastructures are numerous. Extensive events had hands on zones with 40 computers and special live features using the wlan infrastructure in a comparable small room of 200m².

CONNECTIVITY

Besides darmstadtium’s unique IT infrastructure, the congress centre takes up the global megatrend connectivity and offers organizers and guests, in cooperation with Europe's largest mobile communication providers (German Telekom and Vodafone), excellent in-house coverage in terms of mobile network. This represents a quite unique service innovation among German congress centers: unrestricted availability of LTE in all areas of the building enable ongoing and smooth work processes. Mobile working, surfing or making calls – the extensive mobile network connection down to the underground parking provides you convenient and safe access to all your relevant information and communication platforms at any time. We use LTE with MIMO-technology, e.g. for a doubling of the speed.

It is five years now that darmstadtium has a subsidiary, Centralstation Darmstadt, which is a well-established event location in Darmstadt situated in an old electric power plant. We connected both venues via glass fiber and are now within the process to connect five other venues in Darmstadt that are now run by our subsidiary Centralstation Darmstadt. So as a total there will be six venues connected to darmstadtium forming a venue network connected via darmstadtium ICT infrastructure.

Quite unique is darmstadtium capability to provide mobile network connection for some of Darmstadt’s major outdoor city festivals like Heinerfest and Schloßgrabenfest. Because of darmstadtiums geographical situation in the heart of the city we can support and enable best connectivity for all festival visitors.

INCON-CaseStudy-2019-Award-darmstatdium-FoyerOrange.jpg

EVENT SHOWCASE: DRUPALCON 2018

The Drupal Europe Convention 2018, is a perfect showcase on how customers use existing ICT infrastructure and which outstanding customer satisfaction can be achieved:

“… you know, we've seen many things before and DrupalCon has brought down the wifi system of some venues in the past where the IT people were so confident. Not here! Apart of a few isolated issues with client devices, the network worked flawlessly even on the contribution day when most people were concentrated in one specific corner of the building. We had more than a thousand clients every session day on wifi. Somewhat less than half of those devices were Apple devices according to network stats. Roughly 10% of all devices used the 802.11ac protocol while 25% used 802.11n on 2.4Ghz and 75% used 802.11n on 5Ghz.”

– Drupal Europe 2018 Post-event report, page 58

Conference centres never believe us when we say we will eat all your data. And use all your connections. @ds_darmstadtium thank you for providing us with the perfect environment.

I hope we’ll be back again some day. https://t.co/FhpcU3zTPM
— Donna Benjamin (@kattekrab) September 14, 2018

Very few conference centres deliver on WiFi availability for number of clients nor speed. Not once in the week, even during keynotes, did I experience problems. Fantastic service, that’s not just the WiFi either. Highly recommend your conference centre as a venue.
— Paul Johnson (@pdjohnson) September 17, 2018

...wow, this is even faster than the DrupalCon Dublin venue.https://t.co/44TzYP4fUo #DrupalEurope
— Kristine Kaland, Code Archeologist 🧙‍♀️ (@wizonesolutions) September 10, 2018

AWARD CEREMONY

“After receiving the first INCON Digital Infrastructure award in 2014, we are more than happy to receive this prestigious award for the second time. We are trying hard to stay at the edge of ICT technology to offer best possible services to our clients present and meet their future needs. I am very proud that our efforts in this worldwide competition were recognized by the judging panel. INCON is doing a great job by pushing this important topic within the industry world wide.”