Page 121 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

Left to right: Typical backup generator system housed inside special enclosure; Close up of Cat 3516 generator inside enclosure with (L-R) Bob Tanzer & Gene Hamilton
industry. That simply cannot happen. Reliability, therefore, is crucial.
we’re still the best. Caterpillar parts and service is still the King of the Hill.”
THE HYPERSCALE DATA CENTER MARKET
For years, Peterson’s traditional commercial engine business focused on the one and two unit sales for hospitals and commercial buildings, marine, OEMs, and cogeneration and bio-fuel applica- tions. “The big advantage there is that they’re local so we get the product support, which is the life- blood of a dealership,” explains Gene Hamilton, Power’s general sales manager. However, in recent years, the data center segment has simply explod- ed, fueled by the Internet, social media, the tele- com business and, more recently, Covid-19. Today it’s called the Hyperscale Data Center industry. And for good reason. “We’ll sell a generator to a local hospital, for instance, and we won’t sell them anything for another ten or fifteen years. There’s a relationship there, but not a lot of transactions,” says Hamilton. “But a data center customer can build ten to fifteen projects a year. And it’s a six- month turnaround, not a three-year project, so it’s on a much larger scale, with very tight deadlines. It’s huge.”
Armen Kludjian
For years now, data cen- ters have been designed around The Rule of Five 9s or a reliability factor of 99.999%. “They’re building in reliability to an extent we’ve never seen before,” says Kludjian. “And they’re willing to spend the money
because now they can quantify downtime in dol- lars lost quickly. Contracts for co-location facilities actually specify the amount of backup power that’s available in an emergency. Any outage at all is go- ing to move that number down to 99.998.” Which is a big deal and something they cannot afford.
That’s where Peterson comes in. Peterson Power Systems provides backup power to these big data centers in case their primary power cuts out. “Pe- terson’s Mission Critical Team is a part of the Five 9s of Reliability.3 We don’t provide it,” says Klud- jian, “but we’re a link in the chain. When custom- ers look at our ‘link’ versus that of our competitors,
3 Peterson Power’s Mission Critical Team is a group dedicated solely to the data center market.
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