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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.

No pictures for this update, but we do have an updated ETA on our UPS system of September 8. This much later than we had planned for, but we’re still planning on an October opening date. We’re getting a new three-phase Eaton Powerware system that has a whole unit parallel/redundant capability. We’ll certainly take some pictures of it whenever the first pieces arrive.

Our new Verizon circuit is due to be turned up tomorrow as well, and we’re crossing our fingers that they’ll deliver the IPv6 part of our original request working the first time.

UPDATE: The Verizon circuit was not turned up; part of the order as we submitted it back in May 2009 was dropped for unknown reasons and didn’t make it to final implementation.

Since our last update we’ve finished installing the overhead racking and the two-post racks with cable management that will eventually hold routers, switches, and patch panels.

We’ve since leveled and locked the threaded rod clamps down (the blue tape marks “incomplete” things). There’s one more cross section we need to install between the two post racks and the opposing run to reduce wire distance. We were short one section of ladder rack over the weekend and Graybar was closed. Next up are conduit runs from the second floor telco room which sits above and in front of the two post racks seen in the picture and we’ll start replacing ceiling panels that won’t interfere with ductwork installation.

It’s been a while since we’ve posted any pictures of the build (plus the two and a half week delay from the city on the permit to move walls), so here’s a few pictures from about an hour ago on our current progress.

The telco room is, for the most part, complete. We have the fiber rack of course, but we added some classic circuits (T1, PRI, POTS, etc.) terminating in the room as well. Customers who want to bring in their own POTS, DSL, frame or leased lines are welcome to do so as well and we’ll hand them off to your equipment. The board is still quite empty since none of the wiring out of the room has been installed yet.

The server room is coming along quite well. We have half of the overhead racking completed and we’re working on finishing our the rest of it. There’s two layers of overhead space: one for high voltage (UPS circuits) and one for low voltage (Ethernet, telco, etc.). The high voltage level will eventually become home to wire raceways.

Many of the ceiling tiles are still out because ductwork for cooling and wiring for the fire system and alarms hasn’t been installed yet. The blue tape on the floor indicates cabinet rows. A keen eye may notice that long run of racks isn’t quite level. We’re waiting until it’s all in place before we spend the time to fine tune it.