When Gary Chaffin launched Stargate 12 years ago, his core business was domain registration. The company got into shared hosting in the late 1990s and dedicated servers in 2001. As Stargate's customer base grew, so did its data center infrastructure. Gary built out his Naperville, IL facility with APC InfraStruXure power, cooling and rack components.
APC's chilled water cooling distribution units are designed for raised floor environments, which Gary wanted to avoid. As APC CTO Neil Rasmussen puts it in this SearchDataCenter article:
"I can make an air conditioner any size I want, but the problem is getting the air through the tiles. If I try to moving 25kW of air through tile, it's going to be 120 mph coming through floor tile. It's also very inefficient to push all that air over a distance. It takes a tremendous amount of horsepower to move it around. It's not uncommon to find just the fan taking more power than the servers in data centers."
Rasmussen's energy-saving strategy is cabinet level cooling, but Gary (who'd spent many years in the medical diagnostics industry, where he had extensive experience with MRI heat dissipation) came up with a different solution. With APC's assistance, he redesigned its hot aisle containment system to eliminate the raised floor requirement.
APC described Stargate's custom install to other customers; based on their overwhelming interest, Gary decided to build a second data center. The facility (which is schedule for August, 2007 completion) will offer 10- to 35-rack "vaults" with no mix of head loads; customers will have access to precise data on UPS run time, power utilization, etc. for their isolated environments. Since January, over 20 large enterprises, including several financial institutions, have stopped by for tours.
Stargate picked a great time to get into the data center business; there's a tremendous market demand for space. But support-wise, how will the company handle its increasingly diverse customer base, ranging from individual domain owners to large banks? With different staff, said Gary - seeming surprised that such a minor detail could be considered an obstacle.
BTW, Stargate will be sharing its progress through its new blog. I wonder what's next for Gary, now that he's exhausted the entire range of hosting possibilities. We did talk briefly about Sun's data center in a box and APC's mobile data center. You never know; Stargate might find itself in the "container colo" (or data center truck stop) business one of these days.
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