Page 120 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong
P. 120

 Truck with generator onboard before train wreck
in both directions. Luckily no one was hurt, but somebody’s insurance sure was going to take a big hit.
That generator had been headed for one of Pe- terson’s largest data center customers on the east coast. It was part of a 32-unit installation that had taken seven months to source, build and ship. Now with the client’s looming deadline, Peterson had to do it again. Luckily, it was just for the one gen- erator. “The typical timeline to build and deliver a single C175 engine with its enclosure is anywhere
RELIABILITY AND THE RULE OF FIVE 9’S
The Rule of Five 9s—or 99.999% reliability—works
out to 5.26 minutes of downtime a year, which is an acceptable number in the data center business. Over the years, the reliability factor has tightened into Seven 9s and even Nine 9s, which computes to 3.16 seconds and 31.56 milliseconds a year, respectively. The higher the percentage goes, the more backup generators are required—along with additional fuel tanks, batteries, starter batteries and support equip- ment—for a seamless transfer between the electrical grid and the backups ... and back again.
from 16 to 30 weeks, depending on Cat’s availabil- ity,” says Don Whitehead, sales engineering man- ager and thirteen year Peterson veteran. “We did this one in eight weeks. It involved a lot of people pulling a lot of strings, including Cat who helped get an engine ready to go. We’d never had that kind of disaster before, where it required so much from so many people. It was all-hands-on-deck—peo- ple putting in the time and energy, and going the extra mile.”
HISTORY AND THE RULE OF FIVE 9S
Peterson has been involved in the dot-com indus- try since it took root in the Silicon Valley back in the 1990s. And even before that. As the mechani- cal switching gear of the Baby Bells morphed into server farms of computers, the data center was born.1 “There was a tremendous amount of irratio- nal exuberance and cash flying into these business- es, but none of them were making any money,” says Armen Kludjian, Peterson Power engine salesman who sold hundreds of generators to the burgeon- ing industry. “The data center business was in its nacsency. Back then they said a business didn’t need to make a profit. It just needed to have rev- enue.” But then it overbuilt. And that model died with the dot-com bust in 2001.
The second boom hit in 2005-06 when some of those early players reinvented themselves and started quietly buying up those distressed prop- erties under new names.2 Then social media took off (2006), the iPhone came out (2007), streaming video expanded, and the need for reliable band- width soared. All of that information is housed, today, in data centers around the world in The Cloud. If one of them goes down, even for a few seconds, it can mean millions of dollars of lost revenue. And a diminished reputation within the
   1 The telecom industry was a huge Peterson Power customer, even before it evolved into the dot-com industry we know today. AT&T, Pacific Bell, Sprint and others all bought hundreds of backup generators from Peterson Power.
2 These companies cannot be named because of the protections granted in non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with Peterson.
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