ColoSpace

The Dow hit another yearly high this week and business and consumer confidence appears to be improving on a monthly basis.  The CFOs that I am communicating with are talking more often about expanding their payrolls that shrinking them.  We personally have several openings in our technical, sales, and administrative divisions.  Even more significantly, we are seeing a return of investor-backed start-ups. 

A couple of weeks ago ColoSpace sponsored the Speed Venture Summit.  A couple of hundred entrepreneurs spent the day networking and nearly 50 companies gave their elevator pitch to investors.  The buzz was palpable, there was a general feeling of excitement amongst most attendees, and the entrepreneurs were much more positive about funding opportunities than last year (in fact one company who was scheduled to give a pitch pulled out because they completed their round of funding more easily than expected).  

The top five (as voted by investors) companies included companies in the biotech, alternative energy/energy efficiency, and high tech spaces.  These are areas of huge opportunity and companies that should benefit from the unique resources available in our region.  A special congratulations to the winner Highest Wind and runner-up EnerTrac.  It is worth noting that while both of those two firms – one concentrating on alternative energy and one on delivering energy more efficiently – are in hot industries – their main pitch and focus is on reducing their customers’ costs.

We know that start-ups and small businesses are the lifeblood of our economy and I am happy we were able to be part of the event.  Please stay tuned to our blog and e-mail blasts, as we are trying to increase our support of the start-up community in our region.  Feel free to drop me a line if you have any suggestions for us to do so.

Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery planning seems to ebb and flow with both economic cycles and the proximity of the most recent local disaster. With the slow economy and the overexposure by the 24 hour cable news channels to today’s world crises, many of us have tuned out the need to plan for major disruptions in business. Even Hollywood reflects the dilemma of business not planning for basic disruptions. A recent episode in the popular and award-winning TV show “The Office” made the point. In trying to deal with a practice emergency drill, their fearless leader shouts over the mass confusion,  “ I told you to read the procedure manual (all 75 pages of text)”.  We all groan when the fire drill happens on a cold or rainy day, but that practice saves lives and businesses.    

For many people, disaster recovery or business continuity is old news and the assumption is that most businesses have great plans in place.  I recently attended the NEDRIX (New England Disaster Recovery Information Exchange) conference and heard that many businesses and government groups have plans in place but many do not practice or test those plans on a regular basis.  The conference highlighted the advances that have been made in Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery readiness since 9-11 and Katrina within national, state and large firms’ emergency management groups.  

The new planning and simulation/testing software turned the jumbo video screens into a virtual reality world depicting disasters like the California forest fires, an earthquake in Asia and a worldwide contagious disease outbreak.   After the adrenalin rush of seeing these videos and the attendees gave a  sigh of relief that New England has been spared dealing with a major storm during this past hurricane season, the discussion turned to the  crisis of the ice storm of December 2008.  This event impacted tens of thousands locally in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, but for many not directly affected, this was just another crisis on the 24 hour cable news. 

The take away from the conference was most of the government agencies and large firms, especially in regulated industries like healthcare and banking have well documented, well tested plans but many of the small business are not well prepared for disruptions.  It is ironic that many small businesses did not attend the show because of budget or time constraints but they are the firms that need help.  Several small business customers asked about basics, like how to insure that the tape backup gets taken home by the IT guy for “offsite storage”.   Most wanted to know about how to deal with the “less publicized” local “disasters” such as a burst pipe in their building, an operator error that brings down a set of key servers, or a cable cut knocking out their internet for a week.    

It sounds like a broken record, but each conversation around business continuity/disaster recovery starts with creating a plan and practicing/testing the plan.  After practiced, the human resiliency factor kicks when a business is dealing with a real disaster.  Although this seems so obvious, the basics of a sound plan, practice and more practice actually works in the time of critical response. 

ColoSpace is expert in helping customers with their disaster recovery /business continuity planning, data center infrastructure and computer system.  We find that the KISS model is the fastest and most cost effective way of getting started with Business continuity/disaster recovery for businesses large and small, online or brick and mortar, rural or urban.      

I am very excited about this new opportunity to communicate with our current and future customers, our dedicated ColoSpace Team, and everyone else who is interested in learning more about our business from multiple perspectives.  As a technology based organization we embrace the opportunity to work with customers from a varied spectrum each with their own set of technology challenges.  We work hard to stay ahead of the curve as we are implementing the latest technologies each week to meet the needs of our newest customers or a new challenge set forth by one of our existing customers.  Occasionally the challenge for us becomes taking the time to keep up with other technologies, like blogging.  I am glad we are here so let’s get started.

There are many moving parts to each data center operation:  The real estate that houses the facility, power infrastructure, HVAC, network access, monitoring, and more.  Today I would like to take a brief look at data center UPS systems from a maintenance perspective and provide a brief overview of the areas that should be looked at on a regular basis and why.

The UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) power plants at each data center facility are an integral part of our ability to provide high availability power.  Each UPS plant uses DC battery power and converts it to AC power to support data center operations during a loss of utility power.  The systems are designed to run for approximately 15 minutes which allows more than enough time for our emergency backup generators to come online and power data center operations.  The UPS systems also condition power we received from the utility so that we can be sure to deliver clean power to our customer systems on the data center floor.

Each data center has a minimum of two UPS plants to provide redundancy for our customers.  These units contain a cabinet that houses the primary components of the system including an inverter to convert DC power to AC power as well as transformers and capacitors.  One or more battery cabinets will be attached to the main unit each containing approximately 30 or 40 batteries depending on the system.  A single system can operate with just a few batteries or hundreds of batteries depending on the configuration.  Additional battery cabinets will allow you to extend the runtime of your system.

The first item to consider for longevity of your UPS system is the environmental conditions.  UPS systems and the batteries that support them are sensitive to room temperature.  Rooms that house larger UPS systems generally are configured with redundant HVAC systems to maintain the proper conditions at all times.  You should check with your UPS and battery manufacturer to determine the set points for your HVAC units.  Additionally, make sure that you keep the environment as dust free as possible.  Filter changes on HVAC systems and regular maintenance on UPS fan filters are essential.

The second most important item to making sure your UPS system is always providing the proper protection is regular battery maintenance.  UPS system batteries generally have a life span of approximately 5 – 7 years but should be checked regularly.  At ColoSpace we check our batteries quarterly and would recommend that any critical UPS system follow the same procedure.  UPS system batteries should be checked with a high end load tester by professionals.  This process allows failing batteries to be identified and replaced as quickly as possible.  Unfortunately just a few bad batteries can bring down your entire battery string and lead to a number of unexpected problems that may appear that something else is wrong with your UPS system.  Bad batteries also impact the batteries around them reducing the longevity of your entire battery string.  Healthy batteries are the most important component for a UPS system to run properly and deliver predictable results.

The last item that requires regular maintenance is capacitors, particularly in older systems.  The AC and DC capacitors in your UPS plant have a defined life span and can be very dangerous once they start to reach the end of that period.  Capacitor failure can lead to the total failure of your UPS system or fire in the right circumstances.  The life span of your capacitors can usually be determined by the manufacturer and is dependent on the technology used at the time of production.  Capacitor runtime has increased over the years and the timeline for replacement is usually predictable.  Have your capacitors checked by a professional whenever preventative maintenance is performed to avoid unexpected downtime and UPS system failure.

I hope that you have found this quick overview on the basics of UPS maintenance to be helpful.  If you have specific questions about your system please feel free to e-mail me at dsampson@colospace.com or consult your UPS service professional.  I am also happy to entertain future topics for discussion in this forum.

I am often asked about the types of certifications that ColoSpace maintains on its network of six data centers.  Our customers often host critical data that is subject to a host of internal and regulatory requirements.  The best report a data center can provide is a copy of its SAS70 Type II audit. 

Very simply SAS 70 (Type II) is an audit of one’s own procedures, in our case, the operation of a colocation and managed services provider, by an independent CPA firm, over a one year period of time, after which a report is issued to the client (ColoSpace, in this case) at the end of the year. Once completing the yearly report, the clock starts to begin all over, and a new audit is started by the same, or another firm.

 I personally think the costs are high, but also believe the benefits are worth the effort by both us and our customers. At ColoSpace, everyone participates in one way or another with the audit, and our customers are involved as well. We appreciate their help with updating and verifying our access lists and customer information every quarter. Customer employees do leave their jobs, and sometimes we are the last to know. Getting quarterly verification of employees with data center access, is a good reminder that we should be the first to know, rather than they other way around. We have the ability to immediately suspend access, if we or the employer feels it is necessary. 

We have weekly and monthly maintenance checks that need to be made to insure our electrical and cooling equipment, as well as emergency generator, access systems, surveillance equipment, and a number of other items are thoroughly checked to increase uptime performance. Having independent audits to insure these items are completed timely and correctly, is very important to me. It does seem like big brother watching our staff, but it is easy to skip some tasks when you get busy on other things. 

Another good result for our company, is that we standardized our facilities and procedures across all six data center locations. We found this to be costly at first, because each facility does have differences in equipment layout, types and sizes of various mechanical devices such as generators, UPS’s, AC systems, door access, etc., but we could standardize our security procedures, testing and maintenance schedules, and vendors. There is something good about finding good suppliers and vendors that treat you right, and are large enough to handle multiple locations and larger projects. 

With standardization of security cameras, for example, we can view all of our data centers at the same time from any location 24×7, allowing us better utilization of our security staff. 

We are also very fortunate to have our on staff of electrical and mechanical experts. They know our equipment, and can perform preventative maintenance daily, as well as fix them if they break – and do it any day or time that it happens.

We are proud of our staff, and I can recall a recent event, where a fire broke out in one of our redundant UPS’s, just before midnight on a Monday evening. Our on site tech responded to an alarm in the electrical room, and was pushed back by the toxic smelling smoke, and waited for the fire department. Before the fire department allowed us to re-enter the area to check out what happened and respond to any customer issues, six of our ColoSpace maintenance crew and techs were on site ready to perform whatever tasks were necessary. I had arrived on site myself to see them arrive, and wait to go into action. 

Fortunately, our remaining systems stayed in operation and we had a professional fire department that quickly isolated the damaged equipment, and did not need to press the EPO button. Through the SAS 70 audit procedures, they were prepared to enter our space, knew where our proper fire extinguishers were, knew where the clearly marked electric room was located, and we were able to monitor the activity of the firefighters for both ourselves and the command chief who were outside the building using our laptop computers.

I am very proud of our team, and we were able to redeploy a new UPS into the electric room, and remove the old one within 24 hours, without losing our redundant UPS. We know that events like this happen, no matter how much preventative maintenance is done, we just don’t know where or when they will happen.  I can rest pretty easy, knowing how great our ColoSpace staff is at responding to any customer service issue or potential disaster, like the one we experienced.

We certainly learned a lot from the SAS 70 certification process, and I hope you can see why it is important to find out if your present provider has passed their audit? For more information about our services, please send us a note.

ColoSpace has been helping our customers deploy cutting edge technical solutions for more than a decade, and today, in addition to providing hosting services to the financial services and healthcare industries support a number of cutting edge firms in the region.  We are relatively new to the blog-o-sphere, however – I think it’s something about the shoemaker’s kids running around barefoot… 

You will now be able to hear from several of our managers weekly through this blog as well as through Twitter.  Wayne, Dave, Phil and myself (Aaron) will be providing insight and updates into the things that we think are the most meaningful in the industry.

Today I would like to talk about the ability of social media to affect change.  A little outside of the hosting space but I’m in charge, so bear with me.  I recently returned from a month-long honeymoon – we took a trip across Southern Africa, visiting South Africa and Mozambique (and looking across the river at Zimbabwe). 

At one of the northern-most parts of South Africa’s Kruger National Park we stayed in the Pafuri Triangle, a 240 square kilometer park at the confluence of the Luvuvu and Limpopo rivers (as any lover of Kipling would be quite familiar).  The park is quite rural – we were far from mobile phone coverage, and many of the surrounding villages lacked potable water and reliable electricity.  

It was in Pafuri that I met Alweet, who had spent nearly all of his life living in the area.  He worked very hard, took correspondence classes, and became a certified ranger, and today earns a very comfortable living leading photo safari throughout his people’s land.  The pay is good, but the work is hard, and he is away from his family for six weeks at a time, living in tented camps along the Luvuvu river.  

The reason that Alweet’s story was so remarkable has been the way in which he uses Facebook to keep in touch with his family and friends, and also to promote an educational non-profit he is involved with.  Rather than relying on sporadic and expensive telephone service, Facebook has emerged as a much richer communication mechanism.  The sharing of pictures and video allows people to keep in touch in ways never imagined, and all of this can be done from an area that truly defines what it is to be rural.

 The Village Innovation Program has used Facebook and Social media to connect with hundreds of donors located throughout the world and has received donations ranging from money to books to other teacher’s supplies.  When they lost funding from a large International NGO, they decided to harness the power of social media to connect with people.  They are able to further that goal by exploiting each of their individual supporters’ networks, creating a viral effect that has resulted in the COO of an Internet Hosting firm in New England supporting the construction of a library in the Makuleke Village, ten thousand miles away. 

We look forward to enhancing the communication that takes place between our leaders and our customers, employees, and friends.  If you have any suggestions or comments about that way in which we use social media, please do not hesitate to contact us & let us know!

Welcome to the official company blog for ColoSpace.com, where we talk about our company, our industry, and of course, why you should use ColoSpace for your colocation needs .We are excited to add a blog to our site. Please follow us regularly, you’ll never know what we’ll come up with! Our goal is to inform you of everything we know. Please join along, comment when necessary and always ask questions as needed.