Raging Wire is a datacenter out here in Sacramento that EDC has had the oportunity to help design and, now, expand. They are a three-nine datacenter, which means they garentee 99.999% uptime to all their clients. To put that in perspective, thats about 5 miniutes of downtime every 365 days.
The facility was designed and built between 2000 and 2001, shortly before I started at EDC. However, I did get a chance to tour the facility as it was under construction when I shadowed Charlie (before he was my boss) as part of a school project. When the built it they planned 3 phases of the facility, the first bing the original contruction and a data floor that took up about 1/4 of the available space. Phase two was going to take up the next 1/4 of the space and Phase III would expand the facilty to full capacity.
They are currently on the second phase, and about half way though construction. The difficulty in this work is that Raging Wire is doing this work with a live data floor, with some very big name clients, names you would recongnise but I’m not allowed to say due to a Non-Disclosure agreement. Last night I spent about 8 hours out at the facilty observing one of the critical steps in the procees, a comissioning of the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) that controlls just about everything having to do with the power of the facilty. Its the device that will automatically turn breakers on and off, in the correct sequence, as well as start and shutdown generators and other support devices to allow the data center to remain running in the event that the Utility losses power.
It was a VERY impressive demonstration, with two parts. The first step was to make sure that all the devices were connected properly to the PLC, so an operator at a computer was manually telling the PLC to switch breakers on and off (almost always in pairs to keep things running). Basically we manually executed the sequence of events that happen when the utility is lost. On semi-manual (a system liks this is rarely ever full-manual) the process from loss of utility to fully up on generators took about 10 miniutes, and less than 2 of that was on battery power. Just about everything went great, there was one breaker that didn’t respond to the PLC, but it wasn’t critical. So the next step is the big test, a fully automatic recovery from loss of utility. To do this test we actually have somebody go out to the main transformer, where the power comes into the building and shut it off. Everything when flawlessly as it was intended. And INCREADIBLY fast! The generators (they have 3) they specified take less than 10 seconds to go from dead stoped to fully operational, and the entire sequence happens in just about 2 miniutes, with the time on battery power being under 30 seconds.
It truly is a sight to behold, and I hope to be there when the commission the system when they get everything in, which will involve 6 generators and a massive amount of switchgear (the breakers). Speaking of breakers, to give you an idea of the costs involved in building such a faclity (and the resulting fees you would pay to have your computers there), one (1) of the 4000 amp main breakers (of which there are 3) costs $75,000 and weighs almost 300 poinds. And one (1) of the smaller breakers (between 1600 and 3000 amps) cost between $30,000 and $60,000. There about about 20 of these breakers in the switchgear right now, and future plans should do a little more than double it.
I could go on for a long time about how cool this facility really is, but I can tell this post is already quite long, so I’ll leave it for another day.