It has been a busy week so far at our new facility in Seattle. Today's update is all about racks and Fiber.

Above: Tech Support Manager Damian Amrhein wields a hammer drill almost as well as he handles your technical support calls.

As primary contractors finish their work more and more responsibility falls on digital.forest staff to complete the preparations of our new datacenter. We would not dream of sub-contracting issues such as rack installation. For our entire ten years of operations we have always done this job ourselves. This is a job that must be done right the first time, and as the old adage says, if you want it done right - you have to do it yourself. Unlike past situations though this time we have a lot of racks to install. Previously we would do a row or three, this time we are installing well over 100 racks in twelve rows. It is tedious, repetitive work, but shows how well we work as a team.

Above: Hands blurred in high speed installation action, digital.forest Network Manager Kyle Murray hammers home concrete anchors while operations VP Chuck Goolsbee works the wrenches to install racks. This row will house our network, routers, and switches.

Two teams have worked almost around the clock since early Monday to install over 60 racks, and prep for the installation over 50 more coming over from our old facility. Some of the original digital.forest racks from our last move (summer 1998) are being retired. If you need 32 open relay racks, let us know and we'll give you first crack before they go on eBay.

Over the same near round-the-clock schedule this week, our first fiber-optic cable installation continued. OnFiber, our favorite supplier of Metropolitan Area Ethernet services completed much of the circuit from our current facility to our new one. Today they finished the last splice in the fiber optic vault outside our new building, as well as terminated the fiber on one of network racks we bolted in last night.

Above: The OnFiber splicing trailer.

Above: Mike Kim and Brian Medley from OnFiber hard at work splicing fiber in the trailer.

One of our other fiber providers performed a site survey on Monday, and is scheduled to bring their fiber from the first floor up to our datacenter sometime in the next two weeks. We are on schedule, and working hard to be ready for server moves which should start after New Years. We are hoping to have a webcam up at the new facility soon... then you can watch us work in real-time! Until then, you can watch some video:

Click here.

Next up: Networks, part two.