According to its website, Caterpillar has 63 dealers within the US. For these facilities, the company prints a quarterly publication, highlighting “amazing stories” of the clients who have helped make it a Fortune 500 company. This newsletter is called RunReady, and recently VISI was one of only eight clients featured. Entitled “Failure is Not an Option,” author Jack Burke of High Velocity summarized the importance of uptime within the data center services industry. Additionally, the publication provides some great facts and figures to help someone new to the hosting industry understand its complexities and features. Download a copy of this story here!

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Our up-and-coming Eden Prairie Data Center has been quite busy lately! On Monday, a generator arrived on-site. Just today, we happily greeted the arrival of a UPS!

See the data center for yourself on May 21st at our Open House. Join us for lunch and a ribbon-cutting ceremony performed by the Eden Prairie Mayor, or just come for appetizers throughout the afternoon. You won’t want to miss the chance to:

–Take a tour of our new data center
–Mingle with VISI and TDS employees
–Watch a live demo of our managedIP voice solution
–Eat, drink, and win great prizes – including an iPad!

You can RSVP for the Open House. Hope to see you there!

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The picture you see here is the exhaust system of VISI’s new Caterpillar 2250kW diesel generator. These loud and very large pipes will be keeping your servers and other systems online if there were ever a Utility failure affecting our Saint Paul Data Center.

VISI has completed installation of the generator we showed being dropped into the sub-basement of the Saint Paul Data Center.

Here are some quick specs on the generator:

- 16 Cylinder Engine (most cars have just 6)
- 1,800 RPM
- 3,285 HP
- Consumes up to 156 gallons/hour of diesel fuel

(thankfully we don’t have to run this very often)

We have performed full load tests to ensure the generator can handle everything we throw at it. We’ve also run extensive tests with Parsons Electric so that the generator, transfer switches and UPS systems will work seamlessly to ensure continuous power to the data center in the event of a Utility power failure. In our testing the generator was able to spin up and provide power within 11 seconds of being signaled to start.

Because the generator is there to guarantee your systems and data stay online we installed it with redundancy in mind. There are dual coolant pumps, heat exchangers and fuel pumps to make certain the generator will stay up even if one of those parts fails. Constant monitoring of those items will also alert us to any failures allowing us to act quickly if the need arose.

Learn more when you request a tour of a Minnesota-based data center.

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