Tell us about your daily responsibilities overseeing two data centers and the corporate/customer wide infrastructure.
Jeff Wampler: My first task is always to make sure we are meeting our customer service objectives. This includes ongoing monitoring of key tools such as Field View, Solar Winds, and Syslog continuing through the day. In addition, I am reviewing with our engineering team specific current projects, additional customer requirements, trouble shooting and operational outliers.
Since acquiring the Netrix Data Center in Mt. Prospect, you have personally designed and managed a significant number of core enhancements to the 33,000 SF facility. Can you give some insight into some of these leading edge improvements that you have made?
Jeff Wampler: We focused on system redundancy rather than hitting a specific Tier level (per The Uptime Institute). We engineered the upgrade of the facility to circumnavigate all of the issues that we have encountered over the last 25 years of operating our original facility in Alsip that have caused system interruptions. A number of specific upgrades include:
- Installing Kirk Key Interlock panels to switch client load from either UPS bank in real time (“A” to “B” / “B” to “A”),
- IN Phase transfer switches to test the generator systems under full data center load without damaging any of UPS bypass switches, and,
- We installed transfer switches for each of the single source CRAC units to provide for duel source capability
Let us take a moment to talk about energy efficiency (PUE) and some of the significant upgrades that you have made with regard to driving down utility costs.
Jeff Wampler: We increased the original data center floor height from 12” to 24” to be able to support up to 8 kW per cabinet. Our new expansion space is 36” in raised floor height and with in-row cooling and cold aisle enclosure, we will be able to support in excess of 18kW per cabinet.
In addition, we installed the new Liebert DSE roof top economization system that allow us to leverage a substantial amount of free cooling. For roof top temperatures below 57’ we have functionally free cooling. This has dramatically decreased our overall PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) and direct utility costs.
In your opinion, what makes Netrix’s value proposition so unique in the data center/ colocation world?
Jeff Wampler: Everyone has space and power. We could always argue that ours is better but to us, our key differentiators are: a) Private Peering with every major carrier, b) 200+ engineers that can deliver anything from SAN, VMWARE high end route switching support all from 1 call, and c) our CloudHelm orchestration platform for private, public and hybrid cloud all delivered from the same core engineering team and data center platform.
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