Author: Roller Network

The ceiling in the back where the electrical service entrance is 25 feet, so we installed this ladder rack to bring it down to 9 feet in order to ease installation and future additions. It also drastically reduces the installed wire footage.

At the top of the frame you’ll see a set of three conduits on a rack secured to the wall – those carry the fiber optic lines, electrical, and copper to the telco room upstairs (anything secured to channel strut is ours). Those were a chore to install and required the use of a scissor lift, something we’d prefer to avoid for the multiple heavy gauge runs of the UPS mains, bypasses, and generator feed. We’ll be adding a fourth conduit to the ceiling run for the server room air conditioner – which will also be housed on the second floor – as soon as we can get the lift again.

The unpainted section on the concrete wall used to house a large haphazard phone board (which we promptly removed) and will be the future home to our additional electrical service panels to support the UPS room and generator transfer switch.

We have good news; our latest freight delivery arrived unharmed! We’ll just let the pictures speak for themselves.

We can operate four of these together in parallel and have room for three plus their additional battery cabinets. Adding the fourth would require a wall to be moved, something we can do easily in the future when needed. The large paralleling breaker cabinet mentioned in an earlier post allows us to add, replace, or safely service entire units at will without impacting any electrical feeds.

We’d been off to a great start, but unfortunately a few bad things have happened. A battery cabinet for the new UPS system showed up damaged and our Verizon circuit still hasn’t been re-provisioned correctly.

Without a functional circuit with Verizon we can’t use it to perform an uninterrupted migration of our equipment from the old location to our new. Although we could do a hot-cut of our existing circuits and move equipment as quickly as possible, this would cause a noticeable service interruption.

The first part of the UPS system – a battery cabinet – showed up on the 15th damaged in transit. It appears that force was somehow imparted on the cabinet during transit to twist and distort it enough to firmly wedge the battery trays inside, pop several screws, and strip several others. Although it is electrically functional, it would be impossible to service the batteries in the future, and unfortunately we have to return it for replacement.

UPDATE: We now have tracking information for the rest of the delivery; it will be here Friday, September 18.

UPDATE 2: The UPS (the rectifier/inverter portion) arrived undamaged.

Although we are still missing the UPS (now due to arrive on Sept. 16), we did receive the paralleling tie cabinet and started installing the wiring troughs in the server room that will carry the overhead electrical in the server room. They will eventually be installed overhead, but they’re pictured here laid out on the floor to ensure all the bits and pieces that make them up are accounted for and assigned a position in the installation. The paralleling cabinet will feed a distribution panel and provides an isolated bypass point for the UPS cluster via the large 350A breaker. We’ve also included an updated picture of the telco room.

Unfortunately it doesn’t look like we will be able to meet our October 1 target, although we will have as much completed as there is to work with. At Roller Network, we pride ourselves on quality of work and we will not take shortcuts in order to open early.