RackForce Blog
Archive for the 'New Products' Category
May 19th, 2009 [by Doug Alder]
In May of this year GigaCenter will open its doors for tours for prospective customers and customers can begin moving their equipment in June 2009. The design is scalable, we are starting with 30,000 sq. ft. and that will scale easily to over 100,000 sq. ft. This helps preserve the green footprint as less space needs HVAC. Internally the design is modular with up to 32 “GigaVaults” which are completely self-contained datacenter suites with it’s own power, cooling, networking etc. Each GigaVault can hold up to 12 x 42 u racks. Racks can be loaded to 1,000 watts per sq. ft. (note that with in-row cooling two 42u racks of in-row cooling would be required for 10 42u racks at 1000w/sq. ft.) As our president and chief visionary Tim Dufour recently said to us:
We have a design that provides the ultimate in flexibility, scalability, and maximum efficiency (Green). The beauty of the in-row cooling is that it allows us to build at virtually any density per vault. We have cold-aisle containment but can also provide hot-aisle containment to accommodate gas-based fire suppression systems. We have monster racks with additional rack space above that can be used for secure internal use (switches etc.) or customer purposes. Extra security can be provided with heavy diamond mesh over the top of the vault. Any version of an in rack ePDU can be provided as per customer requirements, 10 Gbps networking both LAN and WAN, low cost Internet, and the list goes on. I don’t think anyone on the planet can provide this kind of flexibility.
This is just the start folks, lots more to come 
stay tuned! If you are in need of colocation space and would like a tour of GigaCenter please contact myself Doug Alder (dalder at rackforce dot com ph: +1 (250)448-2203), Jay Robinson (jrobinson at rackforce dot com ph: +1 (250) 717-2340 ext:2303) or Paul Amodea (pamodea at rackforce dot com ph: +1 (604)535-5769 ) to set up an appointment. You had better hurry though as phase I is rapidly selling out and if you miss out on phase I then you’ll have to wait for phase II.
Related posts
May 9th, 2007 [by Doug Alder]
This is the way the world is going, . In our previous post we hit upon a couple of ways virtualization (Called DDS or Dynamic Dedicated Services at RackForce) can benefit server system administrators. Here are some more:
- – traditionally, moving from one RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks)configuration to a different one is difficult and fraught with danger. It is easy to lose all your data when going from say a RAID 1 to a RAID 5 configuration. In a virtual server with hardware RAID this ceases to be a problem as the RAID array is at the hardware level and exists outside of your virtual environment. Switching RAID levels in this instance only requires moving the virtual environment to the new hardware.
- : the same reasoning that applied in the RAID solution above also applies to any other hardware change. Simply move the environment to the new hardware then reset its resource parameters to reflect any changes. This vastly increases flexibility for sysadmins as it reduces labor costs as well as the length of time a change/upgrade takes. It also lowers the chance of something going wrong in the move to practically zero.
- Simplicity of backup/restore. Backing up your data is a simple matter of creating an image of your virtual environment. Your .vhd (Virtual Hard Drive)file can then be easily stored and retrieved from the SAN
- Multiple OS on the same hardware, each sand-boxed in its own environment and running simultaneously
Since we handle hundreds of customer issues, changes and upgrades every week we continually see the value of this approach. If you have a DDS server you likely have already experienced its benefits and your comments would be appreciated. DDS is a RackForce strategy with the goal of delivering “On Demand” services for everything the company does. In our next blog post you will read Part I of the Roadmap so you can gain a more in depth understanding of how your Infrastructure Provider (RackForce) will give you the best opportunity for success.
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April 3rd, 2007 [by Doug Alder]
While using green hydroelectric power(see previous post) is important, reducing the amount of power used is also important for the environment. Doing so frees up power for other customers which reduces the amount of non-green power that would otherwise need to be purchased on the spot market to meet those demands. Done in sufficient quantities it frees up green power for export to the spot market.
now uses new quad-core server technology from IBM to give its customers more processing power and reliability while at the same time reducing its electricity needs due to the new efficiencies IBM has built into this technology.The new servers are three times faster than the servers Rackforce had been previously using, while using 30 percent less electricity. Rackforce has purchased 320 IBM System x servers in 2006 for $1.2 million, and expects to purchase 600 more this year.
“One of our highest costs is powering our data centres, and anything we can do to save electricity makes a big impact on costs,” said Tim Dufour, President of Rackforce. “Our first priority is to provide our customers with the best value and the most reliable hosting available, and the second is being as environmentally responsible and energy efficient as possible. Our new IBM quad-core servers help us achieve those priorities.”
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