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New Facility Progress #8

We have a few pictures we’d like to share for this update. We’ve moved UPS #1 into position in the electrical room where it awaits its electrical connections.

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As before, the blue tape on the floor marks equipment footprints and helps us position everything with appropriate clearances. The unit is heavy enough that it’s indented the composite tile floor where it’s sitting, however the slab underneath is 14″ fiber reinforced concrete intended for industrial loads, so we don’t have to worry about about equipment point loads in here or in the server room. It also makes an excellent mounting surface for concrete anchors.

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This is a view into the electrical room through the door. UPS #1 is immediately to the left, while units #2 and #3 will be placed in a clockwise manner (which you can see in the diagram taped to the far wall). The black box is the paralleling panel board with its internals laying on the floor. The breakers and bus bars were removed to prevent damage and drastically reduce weight (it’s 200 pounds fully assembled) for installation. The empty space to the right will contain two distribution panels to be installed on Monday.

Moving on to the server room, we’ve finished installation of the overhead wireways and started to temporarily place some racks and panels to get a feel for the installation. So far everything is lining up exactly as planned.

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These are the hinge-top wireways that will contain all of the electrical wiring in the server room. Rack outlets will be attached on the opposing side. You can also see the conduit through the ceiling that connects to the telco room upstairs. What’s that black thing bolted to the side of the lower ladder rack, you ask?

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This nifty piece of hardware is called a “patch rack”. It’s basically a 4U mini rack that we’re using to place permanently wired patch panels at strategic locations in the overhead space above the racks. We can do this because we operate a closed floor, escorted access only facility. This allows us to do little things like this to give our customers extra space to work with in their racks rather than taking it up with our equipment.

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And finally, it wouldn’t be much of a photo update without a picture of some racks. These are the four post enclosed cabinets we’re using as standard equipment. The two in this picture are in the planned position right on their blue tape markers and will eventually be leveled and bolted to the floor when the time comes. You can see the patch rack and hinge-top wireways in the overhead ladder racks.

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Announcements Status

Phone Service Unavailable Beginning Sept. 29

Our phone lines are scheduled to be moved to our new office the afternoon of September 29. However, the Verizon circuit has still not been re-provisioned correctly and we don’t have any IP service. Because of this we can’t move our VOIP concentrator to the new office and we will be unable to take calls to our main number (775-284-0383) until further notice.

We will set up a temporary system with some old hardware to answer the lines and take voice messages as a workaround.

UPDATE 10-20-2009: Phone services have been restored.

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New Facility Progress #7

The ceiling in the back where the electrical service entrance is 25 feet, so we installed this ladder rack to bring it down to 9 feet in order to ease installation and future additions. It also drastically reduces the installed wire footage.

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At the top of the frame you’ll see a set of three conduits on a rack secured to the wall – those carry the fiber optic lines, electrical, and copper to the telco room upstairs (anything secured to channel strut is ours). Those were a chore to install and required the use of a scissor lift, something we’d prefer to avoid for the multiple heavy gauge runs of the UPS mains, bypasses, and generator feed. We’ll be adding a fourth conduit to the ceiling run for the server room air conditioner – which will also be housed on the second floor – as soon as we can get the lift again.

The unpainted section on the concrete wall used to house a large haphazard phone board (which we promptly removed) and will be the future home to our additional electrical service panels to support the UPS room and generator transfer switch.

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New Facility Progress #6

We have good news; our latest freight delivery arrived unharmed! We’ll just let the pictures speak for themselves.

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We can operate four of these together in parallel and have room for three plus their additional battery cabinets. Adding the fourth would require a wall to be moved, something we can do easily in the future when needed. The large paralleling breaker cabinet mentioned in an earlier post allows us to add, replace, or safely service entire units at will without impacting any electrical feeds.

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New Facility Progress #5

We’d been off to a great start, but unfortunately a few bad things have happened. A battery cabinet for the new UPS system showed up damaged and our Verizon circuit still hasn’t been re-provisioned correctly.

Without a functional circuit with Verizon we can’t use it to perform an uninterrupted migration of our equipment from the old location to our new. Although we could do a hot-cut of our existing circuits and move equipment as quickly as possible, this would cause a noticeable service interruption.

The first part of the UPS system – a battery cabinet – showed up on the 15th damaged in transit. It appears that force was somehow imparted on the cabinet during transit to twist and distort it enough to firmly wedge the battery trays inside, pop several screws, and strip several others. Although it is electrically functional, it would be impossible to service the batteries in the future, and unfortunately we have to return it for replacement.

UPDATE: We now have tracking information for the rest of the delivery; it will be here Friday, September 18.

UPDATE 2: The UPS (the rectifier/inverter portion) arrived undamaged.