{"id":2459,"date":"2013-05-23T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-05-23T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/otava.test\/update-from-online-tech-major-data-center-initiatives-investments\/"},"modified":"2025-10-14T06:35:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T06:35:08","slug":"update-from-online-tech-major-data-center-initiatives-investments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.otava.com\/blog\/update-from-online-tech-major-data-center-initiatives-investments\/","title":{"rendered":"Update from Online Tech: Major Data Center Initiatives & Investments"},"content":{"rendered":"

Summer is just around the corner in Michigan and when we look outside, it feels like everything is growing right before our eyes.\u00a0 I want to take a few minutes to give you an update on what\u2019s been happening at Online Tech, as it feels like a lot of things are growing quickly with the company as well.
\n\u00a0<\/strong>
\nData Center Updates<\/strong>
\nIf you\u2019ve been to our Mid-Michigan data center<\/a> in the last 6 months, you may have noticed our new Network Operations Center (NOC) that we built out late last year.\u00a0 The NOC houses some of our engineers with systems displays on the wall for us to monitor the systems in real time.\u00a0 This mirrors the NOC in our Ann Arbor 2 data center<\/a> where we\u2019re also monitoring all of the systems across all of our data centers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Next month we\u2019ll also be breaking ground at the Mid-Michigan data center to add 2 additional 1-megawatt generators for additional backup capacity.\u00a0 This $1.5M investment will continue to deliver N+1 generator backup for all systems as we continue to grow the power footprint of the data center.<\/p>\n

New Emergency Broadcast System<\/strong>
\n\"OTOne of the areas we\u2019ve been focused on improving is the time it takes to notify our clients of a client-impacting event at the data center.\u00a0 We took two significant steps over the last 6 months to improve our client-facing communications with a focus on rapid information and communication availability:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. We outsourced our VoIP phone system and Exchange server to a trusted partner so our communication tools will work independently of any data center issue that may arise.<\/li>\n
  2. We created an Outage Alarm system that can e-mail, text and call our clients in the case of an outage with just a few clicks.\u00a0 This custom iPad application sits in each data center NOC connected to a 4G wireless network.\u00a0 This new system dramatically shortens the time it takes to inform our clients of any major incident at the data center.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Our transparency goal is to ensure we inform you of any issues before your customers or users notify you, so you\u2019re in complete charge of the communications with your users.\u00a0 Our emergency broadcast system allows us to provide very quick communication to you of an issue while allowing our operations team to stay focused on fixing the issue as quickly as possible.<\/p>\n

    Admittedly, we\u2019re still learning how quickly to send out an alert message.\u00a0 In the past few months, we have been a little too quick to use the system on what turned out to be minor issues with minimal client impact, but scared a number of our clients with broader than necessary alerts.\u00a0 I apologize for the over-communication.\u00a0 We\u2019re working out the timing and breadth of using these alerts.<\/p>\n

    OTPortal Enhancements<\/strong>
    \nRecently we added features to let you request and track firewall rule changes more easily, copy old firewall rule changes as a starting point for new rules, and have new firewall rules \u201cexpire\u201d on a certain date, so that temporary rules don\u2019t accidentally become permanent ones. This can help with security; we don\u2019t want to leave ports or services open after they are no longer needed.<\/p>\n

    In the next 90 days, we\u2019ll be announcing additional capabilities to the portal to make it easier to control your servers:<\/p>\n