Tour a Major Healthcare Data Center

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Well since our last data center tour was a great success we're going to show you another one that's even larger. Follow me. So here we are at the primary location of a large healthcare provider located in the midwest. They use our cabinets and we're here to show you how they do it. So this facility is 33,000 square foot, three foot raised floor designed up to 17 kilowatts per rack and as you can see there's quite a lot of racks here. Let's go look. Traditional raised floor cooling, hot aisle, cold aisle containment and various degrees of aisle width and 22 feet deck to deck. We've been working with this company for 12 plus years so one of the unique things of their data center cabinet that we make for them is a custom PDU bracket so that they could read the LCD power outlet readings from outside the cabinet without opening the door. Security was also a concern being a healthcare. So here we're going to enter the hot aisle containment. So here are our cabinets. They're special 48U, 28 inches wide, 48 inches deep. This special z-shaped bracket as we call it in our company allows us to mount power strips side by side still but still at 45 degrees facing the rear of the cabinet. So this power strip bracket is inside here with the two power strips facing the back. The concept was done so well 12 years ago it's now standard product. That's how we grow along with you. Another key design feature of this bracket because of the power strips being so deep and the cabinets being only 28 wide turning the power strips at 45 degrees allows the server's hot swappable components to be slid out the back without interfering any of the power strips or the plug allowing everything else to say up. But being that it's a hot aisle and they are growing that's why we're here we're here to help them grow beyond the 17 kilowatts. Containment is always a big factor of that but what we also do is make custom containment panels for them to go around even special physical obstructions like this beam right here. So also on some instances you can see what it takes to put all the cable management hanging from the ceiling from the all thread but on some special occasions you can use our cabinets with our brackets support your fiber cable basket tray right on top of the cabinet so it alleviates any extra labor. All right so let's get out of the summer heat here and head into the cold aisle. More hot aisles at four feet cold aisles are six feet. There I am backing into the cold aisle. They capped off the cold aisle to make sure that that pressure stays inside this area and gets fed into the cabinets. They don't have doors yet because of different fire suppression and safety codes but that is done case by case aisle by aisle. Here are a couple new cabinets just delivered has our nice new logo on it. I can see some of our older cabinets with the older logo which is nice to have a viable customer over the long term. All right now I'm going to turn it over to Scott our regional VP. He's the one that actually worked with the client for the last 15 years. So I wanted to speak to you a [00:03:00] Scott: little bit about the relationship that we have with this large healthcare provider. Been working with the client approximately 15 years. It really all started out as listening to the customer and seeing what their needs were when they were building this new data center at the time. There were some important things that they wanted us to address in their cabinet design. They wanted a specific XYZ dimension and footprint of the cabinet which was unique at the time of the deployment. Also the customer wanted to have three different configurations. They have an HDA configuration, a blade configuration, as well as a standard configuration. All these are identified by a unique part number, very easy to identify, very easy to order as the data center or as the needs continue to grow. Even though all the configurations are unique, the customer can very easily order those configurations. They're able to identify the part number as well as they're able to identify each individual cabinet by unique serial number that Great Lakes places on the cabinet before it ships. The customer wanted the cabinet to be very easily to be deployed so the cabinet comes configured with particular accessories that help them with their installation. They wanted the installation to be very easily understood by the technicians and each component, each accessory labeled and shipped in the cabinet. So even though every configuration is a standard XYZ dimension, there are certain things that are different as far as what equipment is being deployed in those cabinets. Primarily the difference is the power. Some of the equipment has power strips or PDUs mounted in the rear of the cabinet with a very unique bracket which you saw. Other cabinets have a PDU mounted on the front rails to help support a specific type of installation or a specific style of hardware. So as we were talking to the customer about airflow through the cabinet and the densities that they were trying to achieve in this particular environment each cabinet is able to support 17kw, we actually used a unique mesh pattern. The mesh pattern at the time was not a standard for a great lake, but we knew that it existed and the customer was very interested in using this open mesh to be able to deploy in their data center. This is a 78% open mesh per. Our standard at the time was 64% mesh per. So even though the beginning of the deployment was 15 years ago, the open mesh pattern being 78%, that is actually the great lake standard now. We actually do not install a cap plug on the holes that are used to gang the cabinets together. What we decided is not to install those at the factory because this particular customer knew that their technician was going to have to remove all these cap plugs before they physically gang the cabinets together. So that helps them save one step. Another thing that you'll notice on the top of the cabinet, Great Lakes actually has prefabricated holes and mounting positions on the top panel. Again, it may seem something relatively simple or easy, but what we did is we showed the customer that they could use the top of our cabinet to actually mount ladder rack or basket tray. So you can see that they use threaded rod to attach this basket tray to the top of the cabinet. But the customer did not have to fabricate any holes to be able to do that type of install. As you'll notice, this data center has a very high ceiling. This is to help the hot air get up and out of the way of the electronic equipment. You'll also notice that the air handlers are on the outside of the data hall. This is actually used so unauthorized personnel are not on the data center floor. You'll notice that if an air handling unit needs to be serviced or that fire suppression units need to be serviced. That can actually be done on the outside of the white space and a unique hallway. You'll also notice in some cases, Great Lakes has helped the customer deploy containment. So in aisles that are extremely dense, we're starting to put aisle containment doors to help keep the hot air in the aisle and not bleed over to the ambient air and help that hot air rise to the ceiling and out to the air handling units. You'll also notice that some aisles actually have a cap over them. This is to cap the cold aisle and keep the cold air in the aisle. Because of the unique cooling mechanics in this facility, we don't want the cold air to be drawn out of the cold aisle and back to the air handling units. We want to try to cap that, keep the cold air where it belongs, keep it low and keep that cold air going through the active equipment and then back to the hot aisle. So here are some cabinets that were recently delivered. Since these cabinets have not been deployed yet, I'll walk through how these cabinets are assembled and kitted at the factory. You'll notice that every cabinet actually has a brush grommet rail kit. So this brush grommet helps prevent any conditioned air from bypassing the equipment. All cabinets actually are configured with only one side panel and then an extra side panel is added to the order to finish off the end of the row. Since these cabinets will probably never be on gang, one side panel is adequate for this installation. It can be looked at as a cost savings measure. As we're looking in the back of this newly delivered cabinet, you'll notice that we have some accessories that are packaged and strapped to the rails. They are labeled to identify what they are. Also, you'll notice that there are large sections of brush. These large sections of brush actually, when this knockout is removed, they can pass cables down the row without exiting the cabinet through this brush kit that will be installed here. Another thing that you'll notice is that we do have vertical cable troughs that are installed at the factory for the customer. This cable trough was actually fairly unique because it has three small covers. As a standard product, we have one long cover. The customer thought that this cover, since of its small size, would be easier for the technician to remove and then reinstall. Thank you for joining us and we look forward to the next data center tour. There will be more to come, so please subscribe.