In our continued effort to provide our customers with best possible datacenter hosting experience, we have moved forward and have our datacenter audited for SSAE 16 Type II. We have signed the contract with a Certified Public Accountant firm who specializes in SAS70 and SSAE16 audit about 2 weeks ago and we are actively working together to get our audit documentation in place. We expect to complete the SSAE16 Type II audit on the first quarter of 2012.

So, what is this SSAE16 Type II audit you may ask? SSAE16 Type II is a brand new standard for Reporting on service and control at a Service Organization which is replacing SAS70 Type II audit. SSAE16  is effective as of June 15, 2011. It is an accounting standard developed for evaluating service organizations. A SSAE16 report is an extensive assessment of service organization’s business process and information technology control objectives, information safeguards, and activities, and is performed by an independent accounting firm.

Read more about SSAE16 at American Institute of CPA website.

The combination of our Physical Network Operation Center (NOC) and our Virtual Network Operation Center (VNOC) monitors crucial connectivities such as Transit Provider Uplinks, Core Equipments Uplink and Remote Datacenter Uplinks. In addition, we also monitor each and every access layer switchport in our datacenter in order to have visibility into network traffics and obtain historical data.

Sample of our upstream providers uplinks Monitoring

Mechanical Infrastructure Monitoring is also extremely crucial in order to maintain cool air temperature delivery in the datacenter. Our Internal Development team has worked closely with our Datacenter Operation team to build a custom Intranet monitoring application that shows the temperature status of our datacenter facility. Our Intranet application monitors temperature, humidity, Dew Point and airflow to each and every cabinet in the datacenter. We can be really proactive by catching the hotspots early and be able to deliver more air into the rack in order to eliminate hot spots. Our Intranet application will show the racks as Green when temperature is cool, Yellow color if the air delivery is warm, and Red when it goes beyond our high temperature set point. Our NOC and VNOC has the Intranet application open 24/7 in their monitoring screens and our Datacenter operator receives hourly and daily reports on the state of our datacenter air delivery.

Coloinseattle Intranet application that shows temperature/humidity and power consumption status throughout our datacenter area. The boxes represent rack in our datacenter floor. It is green when air temperature is healthy, turns yellow when rack temperature is above acceptable level, and turns red when rack temperature turns into a hotspot.

Coloinseattle Smart Enviromental Monitoring device that shows Temperature, Air Flow, Humidity, Dew Point status on each and every rack in the datacenter.

Aside from Network and Environmental, the monitoring of our power infrastructure such as: Automated Transfer Switch (ATS) level, Uninterruptible Power System (UPS), Floor Power Distribution Units (PDU) and Rack PDU is also extremely crucial. Coloinseattle has visibility to each and every level of the power infrastructure and our Internal Development team has also built a proactive monitoring page similar to our Environmental Monitoring Intranet site. We constantly monitor the Floor PDU Circuit Breaker in order to minimize the chance of power to be overloaded, causing unecessary outage to the rack. Our NOC and VNOC has the Power Monitoring application open 24/7 in their monitoring screens and our Datacenter operator receives hourly and daily reports on the state of our Power Distribution Units.

Coloinseattle Intranet application that shows Circuit Breaker power consumptions in our Floor PDUs. The PDU map is green when power is below 80%. It turns red if its above 80% and alerts us through our Internal ticketing system.

We hope that these examples gives you an insight on how we run our datacenter operation Thanks for reading!

This is Aisle 8. We call this the social media row due to large number of social media customers hosted in this row.

This is Aisle 10 with oversized 48U APC Rack. At the end of the aisle, we have installed a custom cabinet for one of our customer.

This is Aisle6, our partitioned cabinet colocation aisle. We provide 1/6, 1/4, and 1/2 dedicated lockable cabinet space.

The invaluable Crash Cart

Our Caged Meet-Me Room. This is where all networking in Coloinseattle is terminated at. We also run Multiple Redundant Cisco Equipments in this cage.

10 Gigabit Ethernet Service Fibers.

Spare Cisco Switch Blades in stock to prepare for equipment failures.

One of our Distribution switches.

Sea of Cables going in and out of the cage area.

Datacenter Cage that was hand built by Twardus, great Son And Father (90 years old!) company that is no longer around. We will miss them for sure!

Serious Storage Rack

Datacenter Life

By the way, We have also just passed the 1 Year mark on operating production environment in Coloinseattle.com datacenter. We have put the facility on production on the Last week of July 2010, and have made satisfactory progress one year later Here are some of the current photos with comments. Enjoy !

Coloinseattle Suite 120 entrance with our logo. To be honest, we are not too crazy about the off-color neon lime green color. But we’ll make due for now

We have a wall Logo mounted in our Suite 120 reception area. Many people are confused about the coloinseattle name, but don’t be because we are all under Wow Technologies, Inc. umbrella of family The same management team run and operates www.wowrack.com

Our electrical vendor working on the main panel to hook up our newly installed UPS System. Yes those are some serious power cable

New Full Maintenance Bypass being Wired. We also have an extra slot for N+1 breaker capability in the future.

500 Amps Circuit Breaker. Not your average breaker in your apartment closet.

We are a believer in Pre-Drilled Power Trough. We make as much pre-drilled outlets so that we minimize potential issues during electrical outlet installation and reconfiguration in the future.

This is the final product of the Power Through with Pre-drilled outlets that are installed in our datacenter.

This shows inside of the roomy power through. Our electrician loves it!

Electrical Conduits travelling across our datacenter floor.

More electrical Conduits travelling across our datacenter floor.

Typical Power outlet installed above customer racks

Newly installed UPS, Eaton Powerware 9395 275Kva UPS System. Its maintenance bypass is located just to the right of the picture.

Another Eaton UPS inside our datacenter. Main Electrical Panel and Automated Transfer Switch is located on the right of the picture.

Newly installed Eaton 300Kva PDU that delivers power to the top of the rack.

Typical Rack Setup in our datacenter with Zero U PDU installed in the rack. This particular rack has a Three Phase, 30amps, 208V power installed. Close to 11000 Watts per Rack!

We ran our own copper wires across the datacenter. We have easily installed over 10,000 feet of cables in the datacenter.

2 x 45tons CRAH (Computer Room Air Handler) Units sitting next to each other.

Chilled Water Pipe Control

Cold Aisle Mechanical Ducting

Another view of Cold Aisle Mechanical Ducting

Carrier Air Cooled Chiller Unit Located in our chiller plant area.

Chilled Water Supply Pipe and Return Pipe.

Air eliminator installed all over the Chilled water pipe infrastructure.

Our Datacenter Temperature Control. It reads: 60F Set point; 62F Air Delivery, 71F Air Return Temperature. Note the WARNING LOW ROOM TEMP Alert! We need to raise the temperature in the datacenter for the CRAH to stop complaining.

Open Items:
1. Installation of 1 Megawatt Catepillar Generator Upgrade. We are still working with a generator enclosure vendor to place our 1MW cat into an enclosure. We are looking to get a Tier2 Sound Attenuated enclosure with 2000 Gallon of sub base UL142 listed Belly Tank. Until the generator is ready, we will still be utilizing our current 350KW generator that we have onsite.
2. Concrete Slab Pouring for the new 1MW Cat Generator
3. Completing installation of foam pipe insullation for our chilled water pipes
4. Install fences around the perimeter of our chiller plant facility.

The above oustanding items are probably the largest remainder outstanding items in Phase2 of our datacenter build. We hope to complete everything before end of the year 2012.

Following are the project that has been completed:

1. Installation of New Eaton Powerware 9395 UPS. This is a 275Kva capacity UPS System.
2. Installation of New Eaton 300Kva PDU.
3. Installation of new electrical panel to support our Cooling Chiller Infrastructure.
4. Installation of Carrier 100 tons Chiller with 4 x 25 tons compressor
5. Installation of 10 in the datacenter. Row 10 has 23 APC 48U Cabinets with no weight restriction
6. Installation of multiple 10Gigabit Upstream carriers.
7. Turn up of the new 10Gigabit Upstream fibers and putting those lines in production.
8. Additional deployments of datacenter environmental monitoring system.
9. Ran additional 10,000 feet of data cable in our facility.
10. Installation of concrete Slabs to support our outdoor chiller facility
11. Installation of trees, yes! Trees were installed around our chiller facility as means for privacy and environmental friendliness.
12. Buffing and Waxing of datacenter floor to make it shine again after the Phase2 Work.

Needless to say, there has been a lot of good people who have worked around the clock to make all of this happen and I would like to thank our vendors and also our datacenter operation team to make the work possible.

I would also like to share with you one amusing story that happened over the past few months during our datacenter buildouts:

Moving 4000lbs PDU and 2500lbs UPS into our datacenter.
This is certainly not a task for tha faint hearted to say the least! Although our datacenter is located on the first floor of the building, there is no way we can move these behemoth into our datacenter thru the service elevator, nor the front door. We ended up renting a large crane and have 8 of our guys (large and small) work together to move the PDU and UPS into our facility. The craning of the PDU and UPS from the parking level to our datacenter balcony was probably the easiest task. However, pushing the PDU and UPS into the datacenter floor, tilting 4000lbs monster to roll down the entry door “hump”, and pushing NON-WHEELED behemoth with the mere help of thin wood sheets was certainly an “experience”. It took more than 4 hours to move 3 large devices into our datacenter. It took even more sweat and serious pushing with 8 people to move things in! We were just glad that everything went well despite the enormous effort that we put in to move the large devices into our datacenter

Coloinseattle is currently undergoing our second phase of datacenter construction project. We will be adding more cooling capacity, more UPS and PDU capacity and upgrading our diesel generator. In addition, we will also add 2 x 10Gbps Transit into our network infrastructure. We have been planning for the second phase of our construction since the beginning of the year and expect our second phase of construction to be completed by summer of this year.

As of today, 4/27/2011, we are beginning to work on our mechanical construction by installing pipe throughout our datacenter to support chilled water cooling. The pipes are necessary in order to support additional 100tons Carrier chiller unit that will be installed in our chiller plant. We expect the mechanical piping project to be completed in about 2 weeks and we have taken measures to ensure that the project will not impact customer’s infrastructure, nor the ability for customers to perform work in our datacenter.

We have also received our 10Gbps network equipments and have installed it in our border and core routing infrastructure in our datacenter. We are still waiting for the (delayed) fibers from our providers and we hope to have the fiber installation completed as soon as possible.

As for our new UPS system … we had initially planned on purchasing a Mitsubishi 300Kva UPS unit. However after giving the UPS and electrical infrastructure a second thought, we finally decided to stick with Eaton Powerware unit since all of our datacenter electrical infrastructure is running Eaton’s products to-date. Our Brand New Powerware 9395 275Kva Unit will be delivered on 5/16/2011 and we also anticipate the delivery of brand new Eaton 300Kva PDU at around the same week. We are currently working with our electrical contractor in order to facilitate the installation of the UPS/PDU as soon as they arrive. We’ll see how that goes

We do not anticipate the construction project to have any kind of impact to our datacenter operations and we take great care to ensure that we will be able to deliver our SLA to all of our customers. We will keep you posted again when the next exciting events are happening in our datacenter!

Till then, Cheers!

Ed



We have completed the installation of additional mechanical ducts so that cold air can be evenly distributed in our datacenter’s cold aisle. The whole project was completed fairly quickly in less than 1 week, thanks to our hardworking mechanical contractor

We are now expecting the delivery of more air louvers so that we can turn up additional CRAC Unit in our datacenter to increase air delivery to our floorspace. The louvers are expected to arrive sometime this week.

We have also received 40 additional APC cabinets in our datacenter with a combination of 42U and 48U Units. Our datacenter floor is now completely filled up with cabinets and we are certainly ready to “rock and roll” We will be bolting down these cabinets over the next few weeks and prepping them to be ready to be sold!

In addition to the Mechanical Upgrade and APC cabinets, we have also installed additional security gate in our datacenter. Believe it or not, one of our gate vendor’s employee is 90 years old and he is still working on these heavy installation! Kudos to the man! He is such a nice and fun person to be around too!

So whats is next? …

We are wrapping up the purchase of our Brand New 300Kva UPS and Brand new 300Kva PDU this week. We finally decided to go with the Mitsubishi 300Kvs UPS (See blogpost: 4/27/2011 for updated Powerware 9395 UPS Unit) unit due to its leadership in power efficiencies. The Mitsubishi 9900B Whitepaper can be found here: http://www.distributedenergy.com/web-articles/mitsubishi-ups-transformerless-1.aspx for you guys who are interested in this highly efficient UPS system.

Since Mitsubishi is a Japanese company and the UPS are still manufactured and produced in Japan, we were having a little concern due to the recent Japanese quake. However we were re-assured by our vendor that the quake would not affect our delivery date.

Talking about the Japanese quake, it is definitely sad and unfortunate to watch the unfolding tragedy in Japan. I sincerely hope and pray for the wellness of everyone affected by the Japanese Quake and Tsunami.

We apologize for the inconvenience this will cause to our customers, but we promise that you will love the end result All cabinets in our datacenter will have dedicated ducting for cold air delivery right on top of the front of each cabinet. This will result in a much more efficient cooling and this will prepare us to completely isolate the cold aisle from the hot aisle to reach a much more efficient cooling infrastructure in our datacenter.

Thanks for the understanding!

The answer is that we have been super busy lighting up equipments in our datacenter. To date, we have installed more than 600 machines in the coloinseattle datacenter, and we have been actively moving servers into the datacenter twice or three times a week!. Our datacenter crews have been working late at night and we are all exhausted due to the extra hours that we have put in for the past 6 months. However, the good news is that our spirit has never been as high as today and we have gotten quite proficient in moving machines into the new coloinseattle datacenter We are expecting to double the number of servers being moved into our datacenter by end of summer.

As far as datacenter infrastructure goes, there has not been major changes since we officially launched last september other than few cages installation, a few more networking gears installation, biometric entry system, 20+ camera deployments all over the datacenter floor and  installation of power outlets, power conduit & power through.

However, we do have major projects going on and we will officially kick off on the project This week! Following are the stuffs that we are going to be putting into the datacenter in the next 2-4 months.

1. Catepilar Generator with 1000KW capacity

2. Toshiba 300KVA UPS system with latest technology capable of running at 95-96% efficiency. Probably the best out there.

3. 300Kva PDU

4. We will be turning up additional 45 tons CRAC Unit

5. We will be installing 100tons Carrier Air-Cooled Chiller Unit

6. We will be installing more mechanical ducting throughout the datacenter in order to better separate Cold Aisle and Hot Aisle configuration. Every cabinet will have a direct ducting in front of the cold aisle for more efficient cold air delivery.

7. Installation of Curtains to completely segregate Cold Aisle from Hot Aisle.

8. Installation of Multi 10Gbps Internet Transit for our network upgrades

9. Installation of 2 Cisco Catalyst router with Sup720-3BXL supervisor engine and 10Gbps blades.

10.  Installation of 35 additional APC Rack throughout our datacenter.

Yes the next few months will be extremely exciting for us and we can’t wait for all the project to be done by summer of 2011

We have also just acquired an office space that is adjacent to our datacenter facility that will be used as greeting area, and conference room needs.

Photos? Yes it will be coming as our projects are ongoing! Check back often on our Blogs!

Cheers, Ed Osckar