Welcome to the Liberty Center One blog. We hope you will look in frequently and participate in the conversation as we take the next step in our plans to expand out into our second room (affectionately known as Data Room B).

Four years ago, Liberty Center One looked like this:.

 And from these beginnings we transformed the building to look like:

And now it’s time to transform the facility again.

We’ve been thinking about this step for some time now. As many new customers have been choosing Liberty Center One to provide them with a High Availability, High Density infrastructure we have reached the point that the first room – Data Room A – is almost full and we need to light up the second room.

Five years ago when we initiated the process to build Liberty Center One, we took account of all of our experiences as a primary customer of data center services – good and bad – to help us plan out what we wanted in a data center. We toured over 20 different types of facilities – from other commercial centers to enterprise run data rooms and observed good practices and questionable practices. We pulled in requirements from some of the leading manufacturing companies in the region to make sure we were compliant with their needs.

Three years later, we have compiled lessons learned from our own experience operating LCO day to day – things that we did that we really liked and others that we would have done differently.

As we take the next step, we’d like to invite you to participate. We’re just starting down the road to design out our expansion plan and we’ll have plenty to talk about…and plenty of items where we’d like your feedback. Our goal is to be our customers’ most valued and dependable IT partner. A resource that our customers can count on to provide them with rock solid support. We hope that you will participate and that we will all learn and improve at the same time. Feel free to post here and we’ll start the dialogue!

What is HA/HD you may ask.

It’s our way of describing two of Liberty’s most important attributes.

HA = High Availability. We’ve built redundant systems to ensure that our customers enjoy a resilient environment that can withstand power outages, carrier outages, hardware failures, and other types of problems that could potentially take a data center down.

Our original facility design had us using one huge generator per data room. And while having back-up generator capacity is extremely important, it’s more important that your back-up generator starts every time you need it. Take the case of 365 Main, a data center in San Francisco that hosted for CraigsList, Technocrati, Yelp and others. In 2007, their generators failed to start during a Pacific Gas & Electric power outage and they and their customers were down for several hours. The cause? The generators didn’t start. See the article here: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/07/24/generator-failures-caused-365-main-outage/

So, we said, let’s not trust the availability of power to our customers to a starter on a single generator, so we decided to bring two in. So we mitigate the risk of a starter failure by having two – and one generator by itself can support the entire facility. By the way, if you weren’t around when we did bring in the generators, here’s a photo you might like:

Yes, that is a flying generator.

And having the back-up generator plant is only part of the story. What’s the benefit of having redundancy if it’s not maintained? Pat Turner, our CTO spent the better part of last week working on our semi-annual electrical systems maintenance and part of that maintenance was to use our own load bank to perform the National Fire Prevention Association schedule used by hospitals and other high availability entities to ensure that not only will the generators start, but that they will support load. And because we have our own load bank, we perform this test whenever we want, not just when we have the budget.

HD stands for High Density. It was important for us to be in a position to say yes to customers, not no. We had heard “no” a lot when we asked to get more power in our racks at other hosting facilities over the years.  Many leading commercial facilities across the country only allow a customer to put 4 kW in a rack. So what do they do with a customer with a blade enclosure that’s only 21u deep and draws 8 or 9 kW? They charge them for more space – more than they need. We don’t like charging for vapor, we’d prefer to provide value, so we built an environmental infrastructure that can support more – a lot more. In fact, we have one customer running 19 kW in a single rack.

Now not everyone is ready for high density computing today, so as we go forward with Data Room B we are looking at our past experience and comparing that to future projections of where IT delivery systems. Predicting the future is part art and part science and we’re going to take our best shot. Perhaps you can help. If you haven’t virtualized your environment yet, do you plan to do so? Tell us more about where you think you’re heading – fewer, more powerful servers? What would lead you to downsize your hardware but to increase your hardware investment? We’re interested in your input, anytime.

Liberty Center One was projected to have two data rooms, both of about the same size.

When we bought the building the space designated for the data rooms was a 8,000 square foot, high ceiling warehouse. But, we knew that lighting the total footprint would create major inefficiencies and would also inhibit our ability to make building changes down the road with active production customers in the space. So we built out half the room and left the other half until later.

Well, later is now, and while we have the shell of the room ready to go, we’ve charged our architects with the task of looking at the space with a fresh pair of eyes. We’re very excited to see what ideas they have.

The space today looks like this….

By the way — looks like we’re going to have to re-locate our “stuff!” One thing we realized is that we have an excess inventory of open racks. Anyone want to buy some?