Five lessons of a datacenter overhaul

After the adventure with the just-in-time structural inspection, SOEST's lead facilities manager, Phil Rapoza, insisted on proceeding with extreme care. Phil flat refused to begin construction on the condenser roof mounts until the condensers actually arrived. A good thing, too, because the two multi-ton condenser units we received were somewhat different than the unit described in APC's submittal drawings -- different enough that the mounting brackets originally spec'd would have been useless.

One last condenser problem came to light only shortly before the units were ready to ship. Our project team assumed that APC's sales team would know to coat the condensers with outdoor sealant for Hawaii's highly salty, rust-inducing atmosphere. But without an APC project manager on the job, or any of us minding the order, the APC sales people weren't even consulted. As a result, immediately upon arrival the condensers had to be moved from the shipping company's truck onto a university truck and taken to a weather coating professional elsewhere on the island. This at considerable additional expense to SOEST, and the additional cost of a five-day delay during the construction phase of the project.

Putting a project team member in charge of tracking order details and other minutia likely would have avoided these difficulties. Weather-proofing would have been included in the original condenser order. Changes to the condenser models would have been noted long before they arrived, eliminating confusion over the mounting brackets. If you're diving into a datacenter project, you'll want to make sure that a dedicated, detail-oriented project manager is at the top of the budget list. Trust us when we say that the position will more than pay for itself as the project moves along.

Lesson 4: Hold your team close, and your vendors closer

One area for a project manager's special attention is the vendors. There are plenty of places a vendor can trip you up. Watch them like a hawk.

One example was our shipping experience with APC. The sheer volume of gear that APC shipped us for this project was staggering. We wound up using an entire 40 foot container truck to delivery our goods--and it was stuffed. You don't overnight something like that. That gets shipped via ground and sea by a contractor other than APC. And that's where the trouble starts.

Naturally, we simply took APC's word that the shipment was en route as ordered -- and they, in turn, were taking the shipping company's word for it. It turned out, however, that our stuff was ordered and consequently shipped later than we'd thought. That became an issue right around the time we realized the cooling condensers had to be weather coated. Because the project deadline loomed just two weeks away, adding a week or so of weather coating into the schedule was a big problem.

But when APC tried to find our goods in the shipping company's records to see if we could either halt the condenser delivery so APC could coat them, or speed it up so we wouldn't be so crunched for time, the shipping company couldn't give us an exact location. By the time it could, the condensers were bobbing across the Pacific. We couldn't even get the shipping company to prioritize our container so it would get dropped on the dock early Monday morning. We ended up having to shift project deadlines and travel schedules. Staying on top of your vendor's shipping process may be a pain, but it will serve up golden dividends of efficiency on project day.