Secure-24 Data Center Boosting Region's Economy

In a rather nondescript building in a Plymouth Township business park, a growing Michigan managed IT services firm has a showplace data center.

Secure-24 Inc. turned the 18,000-square-foot former concept car engineering center into a data center over the course of six months and opened it in April 2009.

It's the fourth data center for the growing company, which now has 140 employees. Two others are in Southfield and a third is in Arizona.

"All the lessons we have learned in the last nine years we put to work here, from a redundancy aspect, from an efficiency aspect," said Volker Straub, the company's COO, one of two German expats who founded the company in 2001.

The building features multiple redundancies in terms of Internet connections and power sources, and security that would make the Pentagon proud. Two huge boulders guard the front of the building from anyone who might try to crash into it. The outer vestibule is lovely -- and a man trap design. Entrance is only by key card combined with a fingerprint -- and that's just to get into the striking, award-winning office space, not even the data center.

The only non-alarmed entrance to the data center is through a "circle lock" door, which requires a key card, a fingerprint, and a retinal scan. That gets you into the data center lobby. Another key card check is required to get into the data center itself.

The data center is split into two separate rooms -- one for Secure-24 and its customers, the other for Wayne County. When Wayne County moved operations to the Guardian Building, officials realized the Guardian Building was a lousy place for a modern data center. For one thing, where does the backup diesel generator go, on the street? For another, how do you square with installing thick new security walls in a historic building?

So Secure-24 wound up hosting most of Wayne County's IT operations at the Plymouth data center.

Not only that, but Secure-24 and Wayne County created a public-private partnership to offer space in the data center to businesses as an economic development tool. Some pretty impressive companies -- Altair Engineering, an engineering and high-performance computing software developer, Stardock Corp., a video game software developer -- took Wayne County up on the offer. Wayne County's data center also hosts several municipal Enterprise Resource Planning and public utility systems for governments from West Virginia to California. Secure-24 also hosts systems data for Ferro Corp., GST Auto Leather, Life Is Good, International Automotive Components, Dolby Laboratories and many others. Company officials said Wayne County was instrumental in Secure-24's decsion to locate the data center in Plymouth Township, rather than other sites under consideration in Ohio and other parts of Michigan.

There's sophisticated engineering all over the data center, which is cooled by four 30-ton cooling units with piping already installed for four more. There are advanced power and fiber-optic connections in each set of racks in the data center, which contains an estimated 75 miles of cable.

The electrical room, which contains battery packs sufficient to run the center for eight hours in a blackout, is cooled by two seaprate 15-ton cooling units.

And outside, there's a massive 1.25-megawatt diesel generator with a 4,000-gallon fuel tank, and multiple supply contracts for an extended blackout. Best of all, Straub said, client Wayne County can commandeer diesel fuel in a real emergency -- so if something really awful happens, the center is designed never to go down.

All told, the data center is a $5 million investment, Straub said.

Straub also noted that "Michigan is a great place to have a data center. Five months a year we have winter and we don't have to cool anything."

But he cautioned that Secure-24 is not merely in the data center business -- it's in the business of providing a computing environment that its clients can take as much for granted as electric power or telephone dial tone.

"We are in the managed service business," he said. "The data center is just the conduit."

More at http://www.secure-24.com/.

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