Data Center Background!

The facilities include 5,000 square feet of raised floor, a 1,200 square foot telco style room, in addition to a network operations monitoring center, conference rooms, administrative space and break room.

Differentiators

• The physical infrastructure utilizes an $8.5 million investment by Colo.Com, a previous tenant of the building that went out of business due to over-investing and over-building. This investment in infrastructure provides a reliable, high performance data center for customers to host their mission-critical applications.
• The focus is to operate a high quality data protection facility. This translates to a simple, powerful business plan with positive cash flow and a stable, profitable environment for customers.
• The center is carrier-neutral and will enjoy Gig-E and fiber accessibility to XO, Internap, Cable & Wireless, Qwest, MFS, ICG, AT&T and Sprint.
• The center is a highly stable, controlled raised floor environment with an uninterruptible power supply and back-up generator, fire suppression, HVAC, separate cooling zones, humidity control and security.
• Your equipment and bandwidth are monitored 24 hours by 7 days a week by our own engineers, with enhanced monitoring services a call away.
• Highly trained and experienced staff is available to assist you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Their expertise is available for professional services in advanced network design and logical security.

Power
The electric service in the building is connected to a parallel redundant Powerware UPS, which delivers conditioned power to the data center via a Starline Bussway system. This system eliminates the need for traditional power distribution units (PDU's) and enhances the reliability of the system as well as making "A" and "B" power available to every computer equipment cabinet. The power is backed up by a 1000 Kw Cummings diesel generator connected to a 1,600 amp automatic transfer switch (ATS). The batteries in the UPS system can support a full electrical load for 25 minutes, providing ample time for the diesel generator to come online and handle the full load of the data center.

Cooling and humidity is controlled by six (6) 30-ton Data Aire air handling units (AHUs). The AHus are completely redundant (N+2) as only 3 of the AHU's are needed to properly cool the data center if it were fully loaded with equipment. The system keeps the operating environment in the data center at 68 degrees with 45% humidity with a variation of no more than 4 degrees of temperature and 4% humidity.

Network Connectivity
Internet connectivity is provided by dual, redundant Gigabit Ethernet connections (dual Gig-E) to the Cable & Wireless Internet Network Node located in the adjacent building. That node has eight (8) OC-192 connections to the Cable & Wireless network.  There is a secondary connection to XO's Metropolitan Area Network via a 100-base-T Ethernet connection.

Additional fiber connections to the building are provided by Qwest, MCI, and ICG. Qwest and ICG currently provide OC-3 connections to the facility and additional capacity is available from both carriers.

Security and Monitoring
The experienced technical staff monitors all the equipment in the facility, the connections to that equipment, and all visitors to the facility, 24x7. Visitors must be granted access by duly authorized representatives of the data center clients. A biometric scan and surrender of the visitor's driver's license for a proxy card is required for visitors to gain access from the lobby to the administrative area. Another biometric scan and use of the access card is required to enter the raised floor area.

Twenty-three (23) Toshiba cameras, connected to a Toshiba closed circuit surveillance system, monitor the data center. This state-of-the-art system provides NOC staff with the ability to visually monitor all doors to the data center and all cabinets within the data center. The system detects any movement, triggering one or more of the cameras to capture a digital image of the movement, which is recorded to a RAID based hard drive system. The images are archived periodically and can be transferred to any digital media on-demand.

Fire Detection & Suppression
Fire detection within the Data Center is provided by an early detection alarm system monitored both within the NOC and by Honeywell as a backup third party monitoring service. The monitoring system informs the NOC staff of the specific alarm generating the warning and its location. The data center has sensors installed both above and below the raised floor to detect gases that rise with the airflow in the center as well as heavy gases that tend to settle under the floor. The fire suppression system is a pre-action, dry pipe which would discharge water only from the appropriate locations if the heat in the data center increases enough to trigger a fire sprinkler head. The discharge of a sprinkler would signal the emergency power off switch which would simultaneously turn off the electrical power to the entire data center room.