Howard Andrews sold Blue Hill Data Services in Pearl River and retired, lasting all of 15 minutes once he started to commiserate with another avid technophile, Frontline Communications owner Nick Feinberg.
Andrews and Feinberg planned to build a data center for the mid-Hudson, one capable of offering a complete menu of Internet technology du jour ”“ including collocation, managed services and cloud computing ”“ for small and mid-size companies that want the latest technology without the hardware and maintenance hassles.
The partners found the perfect location: 100 Dutch Hill Road in Orangeburg. The new owners of the former Union State Bank totally rehabbed the building”™s interior, and Andrews and Feinberg liked what they saw, especially when they looked out the window: five cell towers in the distance. After investing two years of planning, fine-tuning their business plan and pooling $1.5 million of their own money into the project, they opened Frontline Data Services (frontlineds.com) Oct. 1.
Andrews and Feinberg believe their data center, complete with cloud computing, is a first for the west of the Hudson region. While they don”™t expect to be alone for long, they do expect to set the benchmark for quality service. “That”™s what it”™s all about,” said the partners.
Al Samuels, president of the Rockland Business Association, was “amazed at what I saw when I visited Frontline. It”™s wonderful they have brought this company to Rockland, but more importantly, to our region.”
Storing hardware offsite in Frontline”™s data center doesn”™t just free up needed physical office space for a business owner ”“ it provides an uninterrupted power supply for his or her system, including backup and disaster recovery.
And since data centers rely on redundancy, an electric outage doesn”™t mean the wheels of commerce stop turning. Diesel generators automatically kick in, allowing Frontline”™s clients to continue functioning on laptops and PDAs. “There”™s no tolerance for ”˜down time”™ any more,” Andrews said. “The workday is now 24/7 ”“ that is our new world.”
“Some companies want all their hardware in-house with a dedicated technician on staff,” said Feinberg. For those who do not have the space or the funds needed to retain a dedicated administrator to deal with servers and upgrades needed to grow business and store data, Frontline provides the offsite location for a company”™s hardware, along with its own dedicated team of service technicians that make needed repairs immediately. “Some of its clients prefer to manage their own hardware. That”™s no problem,” said Feinberg. “They have access to our secure data center any time of day or night.
“We all learned something from September 11,” Feinberg said. “I have a data center in lower Manhattan for nearly two decades ”“ when the World Trade Center was attacked and we lost power, our generators immediately kicked on ”“ only to be choked by layers of soot and dust.”
While anything can happen anywhere in today”™s unsettled world, the partners wanted to establish themselves in the mid-Hudson region, where small and mid-size businesses could enjoy the same advantages larger companies have.
Using APC”™s rack system, Frontline has brought the latest data center technology to the heart of the region. “One company may need an entire cabinet,” Feinberg said. “Another may need just a slice; and if it needs more space because it”™s growing, we can provide it.”
To keep equipment operating at optimal temperature (68-72 degrees Fahrenheit), warm exhaust air from cabinets containing computer equipment is drawn directly from the “hot” aisle, cooled through a series of pipes filled with a glycol solution leading to the roof, where a chilling system “squeezes” out the heat, then returns the chilled water to the data center and distributes it to the in-row cooling system; a round-the-clock process to ensure maximum temperature stability.
On hot days, heated water is cooled with mechanical compressors ”“ on days where the temperature warrants wearing a jacket, water is cooled by fans, reducing the need for electricity.
“This system is cost-effective, earth-friendly and much more efficient than under-floor air conditioning,” Andrews said. “If we want to lessen our energy dependence on other countries this is one way to help achieve that goal.”
The building”™s roof provides the space necessary to store the equipment used for the data center”™s cooling system. “Everything is built in redundancy,” Andrews said. “If one chiller needs service, the other immediately takes over without any interruption. Each cabinet in the data center has its own thermostat, so clients are paying for what they use ”“ not to cool the entire space.”
“We have some customers that like working on their own equipment,” Feinberg said. “Those clients have 24/7 access to our secure facility. For those who don”™t, we have our own technicians available 24/7 with the necessary hardware on hand to make repairs quickly ”“ the choice gives the business owner the flexibility of managing their own equipment or having us do it in-house.”
In addition to server management, Frontline offers continuous monitoring of each server”™s status and performance, database replication, load balancing, remote re-boot, firewall protection and virtualization support. “If I provide a customer with a virtual server and they need more memory, storage space or upgrading,” said Feinberg, “we can do that immediately.”
And for businesses that want to take advantage of all that technology has to offer without the hassle of buying equipment, software and hiring an administrator to oversee the operation, “those are the companies that want to use cloud computing” Feinberg said. “A company can have the hardware and software they desire available in our data center at their fingertips. It is all accessible to them through their computer and is far less costly than buying all their own equipment, then maintaining, protecting and upgrading it.”
