Mission Critical - Winter 2008 - (Page 29)

Instant Payback continued Quilogy has 14 offices nationwide. Many of the downtown structures date from the 1800s, and some are pre-Civil War. Quilogy’s three-story headquarters building, built in 1878 as a bank, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. This facility — one of six fully restored buildings that comprise the Quilogy campus — houses a variety of offices and the company’s all-important data center. To protect its business operations in the event of a utility outage, Quilogy uses an APC battery system and Generac QT Series generator to provide seamless short- and long-term backup power to keep the computers operating and the room properly cooled. “Our data center is the nexus of all of our internal systems,” says Alan Groh, chief technology officer. “We also use it to host systems that have been developed for clients, as well as to provide server resources to our project teams working across the country. The adjacent operations Quilogy’s experience shows the wisdom and value of having dependable standby power. center — a separate room — monitors all systems in the data center and keeps tabs on internet connectivity at all of our offices. The headquarters building is connected to an underground AT&T fiberoptic ring, and all of our nearby buildings are interconnected through Quilogy’s own fiber network that runs beneath the streets and sidewalks.” Quilogy’s data center is a 950 square-foot climate-controlled solid floor room containing nine Dell server racks, one AT&T fiber cabinet and one SAN (storage area network). “The server racks are standard 42U racks, which are about 7 feet tall and 2 feet wide,” says Mike Howells, data center engineer. “Each rack holds anywhere from 10 to 16 Dell servers and contains two 3000-kilovoltampere APC redundant battery backup units beneath the computers. Currently, there are about 80 servers in the room. It’s outfitted with three-phase, four-wire electrical service so that we may take advantage of the newer blade servers being offered today. Those servers require 208-volt (V) service, which was not available in our old computer room. Each server is connected to a single rack via Category 5e Ethernet cable running at 1.0 gigabits per second for optimum performance. The modular nature of the rack design allows us to add capacity as our needs grow or change.” The racks are arranged in a hot aisle/cold aisle format to maximize the cooling effectiveness of the air flow. “This design allows for the natural flow of cool air from above to filter into the front of each server,” Alan Grohs explains. Generac provided this 130-kW QT gen set. Quilogy’s data center servers and the windows of the data center office Winter 2008 www.missioncriticalmagazine.com | 29 http://www.missioncriticalmagazine.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Mission Critical - Winter 2008

Mission Critical - Winter 2008 Table of Contents Editorial: What Have We Been Doing? Cronin’s Workshop: Imagining the Perfect Data Center Power And Cooling Solution Digital Power: The Next Edge in Business Resiliency Zinc Whiskers: Keeping Up With The Green Movement Mission Critical Care: Shipping, Staging, and Installation Legal Perspectives: “A Reliable Energy Supply Is Key to Data Center Success” Continued Payback, Instant Protection Beyond the Nines The Green Information Technology Revolution Health Care Network Offers Glimpse of the Future of Backup Power High-Density Data Centers – Discuss, Design, Deploy High Performance Data Centers Call for Innovative Cooling Techniques More Data in the Data Center Five Considerations for Powering Data Center Racks New Products Industry News Events Classifieds Letters Ad Index Datacenter Wiki: wiki-Mission Critical

Mission Critical - Winter 2008

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