The IPTV streams will let editors and reporters view content more relevant to their sections or beats, Kraft says; business writers can view CNBC or MSNBC; sports scribes can peek at scores from ESPN News while writing and editing. (The Times had no comment about what effect TV-to-the-desktop will have on reporters meeting deadlines for filing stories.)

"The firewall separating the Web site operations of The New York Times from the newsroom on 43rd Street is about to come tumbling down," said Editor and Publisher, a newspaper trade publication, when the Times merged its Web and print operations in 2005. Around the same time, a similar consolidation, with less fanfare, happened in the company's IT staff, as employees from the Times' telecom group, mostly PBX phone-system experts, were merged with the data/IP-centric network and computing staffs.

"The technology in the new building couldn't have come at better time," Kraft says. "When we made that decision," to merge all IT groups, "we knew this was going to dovetail with what were going to do the new building in about a year."

Even a year before the staffs were merged, the IT and telecom began cross-training on voice and data networking, even before the decision was made on what vendor they would use for convergence.

"We not only converged traditionally separate voice and data technical folks, but we have reorganized the entire support and operations teams surrounding this," Kraft says. "We believe that the operations going forward will be less expensive going forward than how we've things in the past."

The data backbone in the new building, already constructed, consists of 14 Nortel Enterprise Routing Switch (ERS) 8600 chassis, deployed in redundant pairs. Two pairs of ERS 8600s comprise the backbone and aggregation layer for users. Three pairs of switches will provide the server access layer, and another two pairs will provide the server aggregation layer.

Each switch cluster will be linked via Routed Split Multi-Link Trunking (RSMLT). This is an application of the Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) and Nortel's own SMLT, which lets multiple, active Layer 2 Ethernet connections exist among multiple switches, without use of the spanning tree protocol to eliminate LAN loops between two devices.

"[What] was really attractive about Nortel's [switch products] was the virtual switch technology," Kraft says. "It's our opinion that they have some capabilities there that their competitors do not."

RSMLT makes the four 8600s in the core appear as one virtual switch, with all 10G Ethernet paths among the four boxes fully active. This provides high bandwidth, since the backup routers and paths are fully used, and quick failover in case an Ethernet cable or the 8600 hardware fails.

The RSMLT core fans out to a LAN distribution layer of dual, RSMLT 8600s. From there, stacks of ERS 5520 switches in the wiring closets are attached via Layer 2 SMLT, which provides multi-path connections and connection failover for desktop users.

The VOIP architecture is based on Nortel's Communication Server (CS) 1000 platform, a server-based IP PBX; it's based on Nortel's Meridian PBX feature set, hosted on an IP server running the VxWorks real-time operating system from WindRiver Systems. A redundant pair of CS1000s will serve around 3,600 IP phones in the news, advertising, circulation and other departments in the building. About 300 IP softphones will also be deployed in the Times' new call center, where agents who take classified ad information over the phone will work on a new integrated Call center/business application software from Nortel.

The CS 1000s provide centralized management of over 34 media gateways and 18 signaling servers -- distributed appliances deployed throughout the network to provide VOIP call setup and signaling for various groups around the LAN. A separate CS1000 and signaling/gateways devices will also be deployed for the Times' 300-seat call center for classified and display advertising.