Technology Management, Inc.

Our clients, typically those with data center responsibilities, continue to express the following problems by major category as:

1. Power outage - something went awry and they experienced an unanticipated disaster or near disaster in their data center. Most of the outages result from human error.
2. Power deficiency - the quantity and/or type of server increases or changes incrementally over time and they do not have the power to safely deal with the IT load/consumption today or in the future. They may need to bring additional power but this requires a total electrical system design and capital for additional equipment.
3. Facility, Equipment, Systems age - data centers that are older reach the end of their useful life, say anywhere from 10+ years of age. The better the facility is maintained the longer one can operate the data center but the writing is always on the wall; they do not last forever. Sometimes older facilities become a secondary or disaster recovery facility when they build a new primary facility.
4. Cooling deficiency - as above if one increases the load by purchase of additional servers or installation of more powerful servers (e.g. blade servers) the more heat that is generated. Heat is the enemy of all data centers and will cause failure of the compute and other equipment prematurely.
5. Facility, Equipment, Systems replacement/upgrade - any number of the elements (power, mechanical, security, fire equipment, systems, etc.) that are installed in a data center or outside of the data center can be problematic and may require replacement/upgrade or enhancement.
6. Facility limitations - facility is too small, or has an "at-risk" location, and corporation needs to consider new or expansion of another.
7. Capital limitations - the data center continues to soak up too much capital and the corporate coffers are limited - available funds beyond budgeted dollars are scarce. Corporations try to live with the existing data center for as long as possible.

We perform our facility assessment services to provide our clients with an independent and objective assessment of their facility's capacity (today's and future) and end of life forecasts.

Our clients use the assessment as a valuable tool to:

• identify, define and correct a problem,
• to gain an objective evaluation of the facility, to forecast the future viability of the facility to meet the space, capacity and reliability needs of the business, to identify and recommend improvements through various solutions.

Each facility assessment engagement, our base level consulting service, is unique to the client requirements. At the onset we identify the assessment scope and in particular the objectives and timeline for the assessment. We prepare load and density calculations, review your facility design and compare your attributes to the facility Tier rating system best practices. The engagement is led by a TMI senior level project manager, often a firm partner, with on-site inspection, information gathering and interviews of personnel.

The deliverables, prepared and reviewed by our senior level TMI staff, include our comprehensive management report, solutions and line item budget pricing. Each engagement typically requires 4-6 weeks to complete; we often perform the assessment for all of the clients facilities at one time.   The benefit is providing you with excellent and objective information to guide your future decisions.

This TMI service provides those looking to build new or retrofit an existing facility with a plan prepared by our architects and engineers that fits your organization's requirements. The process includes:

• TMI personnel will meet with client personnel to listen to the organization's needs and desires, determine the data center requirements, and help to determine a practical approach to designing the site.
• We discuss and seek agreement on all systems associated with the data center, including walls, ceilings, flooring, fire protection, mechanical, emergency power, UPS systems and other electrical system components.
• Together with client staff we will develop the conceptual design of the facility.

The deliverables, prepared and reviewed by our senior level TMI staff, include a scope of work statement by discipline, floor/equipment plan, single line electrical diagram, detailed budget, and milestone schedule. The benefit is providing you with a clear and documented scope of work for the proposed project, a description of the various attributes of the new site and a working road map for the development of the new facility.

As practitioners of data center design with nearly 100 years of collective experience, we feel DESIGN is the key ingredient and driver of everything connected to your data center project including timely and within budget completion, day one and future capacity, integrated operations and reliability. Good DESIGN simply cannot be underestimated and should be prepared at the hands of licensed professionals. DESIGN simply provides you with the reliability, scalability and efficiency your business requires with your primary IT asset, the data center. DESIGN is more than the production of construction documents; a lot more. As the DESIGN agent for many Fortune 500 clients we have confidence our DESIGN process, honed over the years, will best meet your requirements today and in the future.

Our experience shows us that those with poor design pay the price and typically experience an unfair share of damaging ills. The most visible being the unplanned outage to their data center. It's tough to pencil the total cost of poor design yet we know excellence in design pays dividends throughout the life cycle of the data center. When it gets down to it, we recommend our clients always make the prudent investment in design.

A tough question to answer to be sure and one without a certain answer. We know the life expectancy of the typical enterprise class data center is generally 10 to 15 years. Our experience and data reveals that disciplined operational and management practices as well as routine critical systems maintenance, always performed at the hands of professionals, will certainly extend the life of the facility. You may gain years of operation but the writing is on the wall. Expiry of a single existing critical infrastructure element or capacity limitations will preclude continued operations of the facility. A solution to extend the life a bit more may exist, however, it may not make economic sense to implement. In the end, no one can afford the band aid or interim solution.

For example, if the IT load density exceeds safe operational levels on the equipment and you require more power deployed to fulfill continued server deployments on the floor, then one possibly needs to consider an electrical system redesign to continue into the future.

Some users prefer slab construction for data center design and/or may require elimination of the raised floor due to clear height limitations. They gain savings without the cost of the raised floor and drop ceiling system installation as well as flexibility with, they feel, overhead distribution of power, cooling and network cabling. They like to see the infrastructure and nothing installed below the raised floor.

Most systems perform to unbelievably high standards at over 99% availability. Unfortunately, most outages, say 70% or more, result from human error. Therefore you can avoid future outages with emphasis on management, training and security of those with responsibilities in the data center.

Honestly, that is what we do for a living. At TMI, our data center design strength is complimented by our project management services. We have a track record of on-time and on-budget data center project completions totaling over 6 million square feet. That's the equivalent of completing 1,200 5k SF data centers. We know what we are doing, enjoy it, and can do it for you. We are competitively priced and an industry leading firm.

Yes, by all means, one needs to first establish a baseline PUE for the existing facility/environment. Data Center PUE should then be calculated on an annual and monthly basis. Subsequent infrastructure improvement value can then be measured with PUE calculations against the baseline measurement. Measuring your PUE across your facilities needs to be done consistently so that you have, in the context of your organization, an apples-to-apples comparison. Improvements in PUE will help drive the TCO of the facility lower.

Our client experience tells us that they prioritize practical solutions. The solution has to be practical in cost, proven in implementation, management friendly, operationally robust and of high reliability. Why? Most everyone is operating with fewer budgeted IT dollars and staff yet the visibility of the data center and IT in general, is top shelf given the reliance of the business on and cost of the asset as well as the risks of failure. Specifically, we like that firms are benefitting from virtualization; makes sense to better utilize that which you already own.

Again, a tough question to answer. Today, we assist many clients with the process to answer this very question. If the firm wishes to outsource their IT department, in full or in part, then colocation offers a valuable service. Additionally, if your organization enjoys healthy and perhaps unpredictable growth, then colocation too is a good fit. However, if your organization requires ownership and control of your data for compliance or security based reasons and you wish to maintain the IT organization and operations in-house then your options do not include colocation as a viable alternative.  From a total cost standpoint, we know that data center ownership is less expensive, over time, than forking over monthly recurring charges to the colocation company for each month of the lease term. Perhaps colocation represents less headaches to you and your organization but it comes at a heavy price. We all know that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Once you select TMI as the designer and sign an agreement with us you retain ownership of the drawings and other products of the design work. We prepare 100% construction and as-built drawings for each and every TMI project.

Design solutions that optimize the compute performance of the servers and achieve maximum percentage of free cooling on year round basis will go along way towards future proofing the facility. A design which can accommodate, in a traditional white space design, a mixture of solutions/products from traditional racks to high temp air cooled and high temp liquid cooled racks is favorable towards this end.

We prefer the design-bid-build process as it best suited to the interests of the client. The opportunity to include multiple bids from various agents, including general contractors, is attractive for various reasons. With either method the project timeline will not be in jeopardy but the project cost savings are more likely to be realized with design-bid-build.

Typically no certification of the facility is required, more often, a self-rated assessment and based upon the guidelines issued by the Uptime Institute is practiced and sufficient. We have found most clients do not need to expend the significant dollars required to have Uptime Tier certification performed.

They should be independent, thorough, experienced and objective to all other interests. We often act as the independent and objective third party commissioning agent for those installing new systems or testing existing systems. Your systems need to operate on-demand and as per the design, current load and manufacturer specifications. Hire TMI to have knowledge of and confidence in all aspects of your systems.

TMI is respectful of our client relationships. We provide referrals strictly for referral purposes and only with the advance permission of the client. We match your proposed project type to client projects of similar services scope and facility type.

We do not have existing conflicts of interest nor compete with these service providers. We are an objective and independent provider of our specialized services.

Typically, in traditional white space design, we see a 24" raised floor as minimum standard and which is used for distribution of cold air to the cold aisles and electrical power to the PDUs. In a raised floor environment overhead area is typically used for network communications including separation of fiber from copper cabling. The drop ceiling is typically used as the return air plenum but not always. Alternatively, without raised floor, then distribution of all systems overhead is required.

We typically design with modular cooling systems as best demonstrated with peripheral CRAC and return air ducted systems. With higher density computing, say of 5kW or more per rack, we have used in-row cooling implementations. For even higher density compute environments we have designed more robust systems. It's all about avoiding air mixing and hot spots.

We prefer to design the electrical side with separate electrical vault room, UPS, and breakers, electrical switch gear segregation. We typically place the PDU's on phased basis on the raised floor so as to minimize the electrical cabling distances. With each support area we anticipate support systems growth and will include minimally up to 50% area for growth.

If air cooled data center, then IT loads must be arranged in a hot aisle/cold aisle fashion. Supplied air shall be at a temperature no greater than 81 degrees Fahrenheit.

If moving from enterprise data center to colocation facility then call us. We will take you through the ropes from start to finish. The negotiated agreement with the provider needs to be at market, scalable to your growth requirements and the charges/fees are to be based upon actual use and not based on the provisioned power nor space.

To collect, preserve performance and reliability data in a manner that enables meaningful comparisons is of high value to the organization. The system design must address the related issues of calibration, configuration management, data archival, data storage, cataloging, retrieval, report generation and dissemination of resources. Robust procedures are typically required to ensure that data is collected, processed, archived and maintained in useful forms to be of value today and in the future. Data capturing normal performance, component failure, component maintenance, and component repair times are valuable resources for most organizations.

We understand the importance of a well-executed move and the risks associated with the project. TMI works with our strategic alliance partners that specialize in data center moves. They manage the entire process from planning, migration, test, cut-over as well as the physical move and the green recycling of surplus IT equipment. We are happy to refer you to our capable and experienced partners No matter your location we can get the job done for you.

Our strategic alliance partners offer excellence with networking your enterprise to suit your requirements. From ports to bandwidth we can design systems, prepare solutions and seamlessly integrate the new systems to support and fit your environment. Ask about our team qualifications.

We do not. We are not a distributor; value added reseller or manufacturer's representative. We are primarily a data center design shop. In fact, we take pride in our ability to serve as your objective and independent resource for evaluation, recommendation and procurement of the best IT products and equipment. As such we do not have any conflicts of interest; our interests are aligned with yours. Together we do what is best for your data center environment. 
We can help you with procurement of the critical systems equipment.  The benefit is accurate information, order certainty, advance order of long lead items and significant costs savings. We have purchased millions of dollars of equipment for our client's data centers and we maintain excellent relationships with the various distributors and manufacturers.  We also are resourceful and evaluate other channel opportunities to source the exact equipment specified and which may be available at favorable off-discount pricing and with full warranty.

Without hesitation we are proponents of incorporation of free cooling in the design of a data center. Some geographic locations make more sense than others but there is little down side to the use of Mother Nature to counter balance or offset the carbon footprint of your data center.