UPS Essentials: What to Watch for in Facility Design

When touring with potential clients there are always a strict list of things that they’d like to see. Fail over systems seem to rank at the top of the list. We field several questions about how our UPS stacks up against others in the industry. This is a fun question since CyrusOne tends to break the mold, and goes above and beyond what is standard. The UPS plays an important role in any viable data center. Among other things, it ‘cleans’ the power and ensures systems are operational while generators are coming online.

In our design, we eliminate single points of failure. Because of this, CyrusOne can offer customers a higher level of resiliency and redundancy. The new distributed redundant design enables us to use our backplane more efficiently while reducing costs. We achieve this through scalable growth in a 2N architecture, powering customer cabinets from four isolated, compartmentalized power legs.

In the past, maintenance on a UPS would mean bringing down either power side A or B, which would require working with customers, tracing out whips, and so on. This new design places static switches on each PDU enabling it to be connected to a separate UPS. Having this separated UPS allows us do maintenance without impacting power to the cabinet or disrupting the customer.

— posted by Dan Vasquez

Orchestrating Success: 7 Keys to Facility Harmony.

Throughout my 25-plus year career, I have had the pleasure of being part of some really fabulous operational teams and a few not-so-fabulous teams. In thinking about the differences between the great teams and the not so great, I found one common recognizable trait: The good team had excellent harmony. In the mission-critical facility world, I have recognized several keys, seven to be exact, that every great team represented without exception.

These seven key areas are all representative of every outstanding organization I have ever known or been associated with, and in every instance there was an air of true harmony in all aspects of the team.

1. Accountability at all levels. Too many times accountability is viewed in a top-down perspective. The best organizations have accountability that works top down, side to side, and bottom to top. People need to check their egos at the security gate for this kind of responsibility to be possible. When employees and managers understand that the priority for any manager, at any level, is to enable the employees to be effective, and employees have an obligation to make sure their managers know what is needed to be effective, then the team starts to build harmony.When employees know and accept that they are part of a team and the success of that team is dependent on the team’s efforts and are willing to help each other through mistakes and impart knowledge as a natural part of the day-to-day work effort, more harmony is built at the peer level.

2. Continuous improvement mind-set at the employee level (which means every employee). Generally, each successful team has enormous pride and has an innate drive or desire to be the best; to continually improve; to always have their coworkers’ back; and to contribute to the continual success of the team. Some of the best ideas for improvement come from the people who have to do tasks on a daily basis. The best organizations empower and enable those employees to take the initiative to bring forward and implement improvement steps that would be easily overlooked or dismissed by management. This is a huge factor in allowing employees to improve their day-to-day work life and contribute value that may not otherwise be realized. Harmony is then achieved via a continually improving and more effective workforce.

3. Technology. The best teams understand that the use of technology for technology’s sake is a waste. They also understand that the misuse of technology leads to problems or inefficiencies. The effective marrying of technology to improve efficiency brings value by improving the overall process of completing the tasks at hand.

4. Awareness. In the mission-critical world, systems are robust and have high tolerances against failures. Operations teams that are inherently aware of their environment know the leading indicators of potential problems long before they become an issue. Recognizing that a CRAC/CRAH has a slightly higher vibration or even a different ambient sound has saved operations teams from many failed blower motors. Noticing the little things enables teams to avoid stressful events caused by a failure. Less stress equals more harmony.

5. Invest in people. At the end of the day, everything that gets done (right or wrong) is done by people. Every successful operation takes the time to invest in its people, from training to mentoring, to ensuring a clear path for growth.I like to ask managers to cite an example of one employee who everyone thought was hopeless, and what they had done to help rescue, or turn that employee around. The high-performing employees almost always succeed and need to be continually challenged and recognized. Too many times, the lower-performing employees are ignored or pushed out the door with no attempt by a manager or the respective team to turn those employees around. Top organizations invest in improving the lower-performing employee as much or more than the top performers. When lower-performing employees learn a more productive way and perform at higher levels, the team as a whole can celebrate their accomplishment.

6. Fun. The top organizations are very productive and have fun at what they do while maintaining the proper professional demeanor. If the environment is such that employees enjoy coming to work, they will perform better. Absenteeism is reduced, and people pitch in regularly to get the job done.

7. It is everyone’s job. We have all heard it: the dreaded answer of “It’s not my job.” Establishing an atmosphere where the response of “I’m sorry, no” turns to an attitude of “let’s make this work” is key to an efficient data center. I worked for a bank early in my career and the standing order from the CEO was that if any customer called you, you owned the responsibility of making sure that customer’s problems were resolved. Even as an IT project manager, I fielded my fair share of ATM card issues. Though I personally resolved nothing, I made sure the customer was connected with the people who could help him or her and stayed involved until I knew customer’s concerns were handled satisfactorily. That was the way of that company, and it was very effective. It’s because of this mantra that you’ve never witnessed or heard me say, “It’s not my job.”

— posted by Michael Duckett

A Pencils-Down (and iPads-off) Datacenter Design Session

The data center design process is my favorite part of the data center development life cycle. It’s a time where all things are possible, all technologies are viable, any milestone is achievable, and every far-fetched idea has merit. Of course, the design team is inevitably brought back to reality once the restrictions of schedule and budget are applied. But for that brief period of time where some of the world’s most vocal data center minds are in one large room exchanging ideas, experiences, and technologies, it is an experience to be savored for any hardcore data center professional.

We here at CyrusOne have just completed two of these design exercises—one for our 670,000-square-foot facility in Carrollton, Texas, and another for our new campus in Phoenix, Ariz. The results for both are going to rock the multitenant data center industry in their industry-best efficiency, design simplicity, and unprecedented time to market. I always feel intensely fortunate to have the opportunity to take part in these design sessions. After all, it’s a rare event. How many mega-data-center facilities are designed and built in one’s career?

With this in mind, I came up with a concept of sharing this part of the data center development process with a wider audience. As a result, we’ll be hosting the industry’s first Open Peer Review next month in Phoenix, where we plan to collectively roll up our sleeves and roll out the one-lines of our new Chandler, Ariz., project in order to seek very detailed input from a gathering of some of the data center industry’s most innovative minds. It’s going to be a pencils-down (and iPads-off) design session where we hope to further improve our product offering by essentially crowd-sourcing design ideas from some of the most demanding data center consumers and designers in the world. At the same time, our attendees are undoubtedly going to walk away with some new insights gained from the process.

It’s a win-win for all involved, and we hope that you join us in Phoenix for this industry-first event.

— posted by Kevin Timmons

This blog is designed to provide updates of the on-going construction projects CyrusOne is simultaneously conducting.

CyrusOne is building a 92,000 square foot data center on its Houston West Campus. This new data center is being built adjacent to the existing Houston center with the addition of seven megawatts of power. With the additional square footage and power, the Houston Data Center will total 188,000 square feet with 15 megawatts of power.