How reliable is your power?

One of our most recent clients chose to move their critical production computer systems to Lifeline’s outsource data center because of their new office location.  They recently moved the main office to a brand new office park, and the power has been extremely unreliable.  In January, they had been told by the power company that power would be shut down for four hours on two different Sundays.  The client operates a business in which their employees access their critical systems 24/7, so the idea of two four hour outages was unacceptable.

Fortunately the client had already made the decision to place their primary systems at Lifeline.  The features they sought when they were shopping were:

• Fully redundant power with 99.995% uptime
• Hardened data center – F5 tornado resistant
• SAS 70 data center – some of their clients require the SAS 70 certification
• Affordable colocation – they needed a facilities provider, not a managed services provider.  And they didn’t want to pay for services they wouldn’t use.
• Carrier neutral data center – the client  bought a point to point dark fiber connection from one carrier.  This is a 1Gbps connection their home office to the data center, and it is enough bandwidth to make it seem as though their critical computer  systems are in the next room.   They also bought their Internet connection from a separate provider based on price and bandwidth requirements.  Using a carrier neutral facility gave them choices and saved them any monthly cross-connect fees.

So this client primarily chose Lifeline to avoid the downtime that faulty power was causing, and to gain the other benefits that that Lifeline’s Midwest colocation facility provides.

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.