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// Case Study

Three Data
Centers

Built ground up in Lansing, Michigan - owner side, full lifecycle. I selected the sites, drew the floor plans by hand, designed the power chain from the utility feed to the branch circuit, managed the contractors and the utility, ran commissioning, and then operated the buildings for the next decade.

Liquid Web Inc Lansing, Michigan 2002–2015 Director of Infrastructure → COO
3
Facilities, ground up
$80M
Largest build
13.8kV
Utility service
2N+1
Power topology

// Scope

What I owned

On all three buildings I held the full project lifecycle: site selection and real estate, floor plan and system design, equipment evaluation and purchasing, contractor and utility management, permitting, commissioning, and the operations afterward. There was no owner's representative between me and the work - I wrote the scope, hired the trades, and then lived in the result.

The largest was an $80M ground-up build served by a utility substation constructed to support it.

Site & program

Site selection and real estate. Hand-drew every floor plan - siting the mechanical, electrical and network rooms, then laying out rack rows, containment, and cable pathways around them.

Procurement

Equipment evaluation and purchasing across every build, including long-lead items. Negotiated the utility, generator, UPS and switchgear contracts directly.

Delivery

Managed all general and trade contractors and the permitting process on each project, through commissioning and turnover into live operation.

Architectural cutaway rendering of the Liquid Web data center campus, showing the data halls with rack rows, the mechanical and electrical spaces, and the office areas.
Cutaway of the finished building - data halls, mechanical and electrical rooms, and the office side. Rendering by Studio Intrigue Architects, Lansing, commissioned for the project.
Exterior of the completed Liquid Web data center building in Lansing, Michigan.
The finished building.

// Critical Power

Utility feed to branch circuit

I designed the complete power chain on each facility, at topologies up to 2N+1, and specified and purchased the equipment that made it up.

MAINT. BYPASS UTILITY POWER 13.8kV FEED TRANSFORMER STEP-DOWN 480V 3-PHASE ATS AUTO TRANSFER SWITCH GENERATOR DIESEL STANDBY UPS (N+1) UNINTERRUPTIBLE POWER SUPPLY BATTERIES VRLA / FLYWHEEL PDU DISTRIBUTION METERED BRANCH CIRCUIT MONITORING 42U RACK

Single-line: 13.8kV utility service through metered rack-level branch circuit monitoring.

Distribution

13.8kV utility service, step-down transformers, 480V three-phase distribution, automatic transfer switch, diesel standby generation, UPS at N+1, PDUs, and metered rack-level branch circuit monitoring.

Topology & gear

Redundancy to 2N+1. Switchgear, paralleling, and maintenance bypass. VRLA battery plants, with flywheel storage evaluated as an alternative.

Quality & safety

Power factor and harmonics, arc flash hazard, selective coordination, grounding and bonding - carried through design, construction and the operating procedures afterward.

Outdoor medium voltage switchgear lineup with danger high voltage placards.
Medium voltage switchgear on the 13.8kV service.
A long row of Generac standby generator sets alongside the building, with conduit stacked on the ground.
The standby plant. Conduit still on the ground.
Switchgear lineup during installation, cabinet sections open showing copper busbar and breaker compartments.
Switchgear during installation, before energisation.
Close-up of switchgear terminations: copper busbar with load and emergency labels and lugged feeder cables.
Terminations. Load and emergency bus.
Electrician working inside an open switchgear section, banks of conduit entering the electrical room overhead.
Controls termination, conduit banks overhead.
Row of UPS cabinets in a finished electrical room with overhead conduit.
UPS lineup, N+1.
UPS distribution switchboard with breaker sections and metering.
UPS distribution switchboard.
Technicians performing maintenance in the UPS room between rows of cabinets.
Maintenance in the UPS room.
Walking the electrical rooms - distribution, the Liebert panel, switchgear, and the rows they feed.

Heat rejection

Data hall HVAC and heat rejection design, redundancy planning, and the failure-mode analysis behind it.

Telemetry

Facilities monitoring built in-house across UPS, cooling and environmental systems, with custom alerting and reporting tooling.

Physical security

Access control and camera systems, and the operational procedures wrapped around them.

Three-dimensional layout model of the data center floor showing the data halls, rack rows, mechanical and electrical spaces, and the office area.
Layout model - data halls and rack rows against the mechanical and electrical spaces that serve them, and the office side beyond.

// Network

The highest-capacity network in Lansing

A carrier-grade network built from nothing. I sourced dark fiber IRUs, connected to the local ILEC over a DWDM ring, and extended lit services to upstream providers in larger metros.

BGP with full tables at the border, EIGRP internally, IX peering, ARIN allocations and AS numbers, and Arbor Networks DDoS mitigation. I owned the whole lifecycle here too - provider selection, contract negotiation, procurement, Cisco and Arista configuration, fiber termination, and monitoring through Cacti, SNMP and Netflow.

A data hall aisle with equipment cabinets along the wall and overhead cable tray carrying bundled network cabling.
Overhead tray carrying the copper and fiber down the hall.
Close-up of stacked network switches showing banks of RJ45 ports and uplink modules.
Access switching. Ports, uplinks, and a lot of patching.
Rows of server racks with dense structured cabling running into vertical managers.
Racks and structured cabling on the floor.
Interior of a rack server showing a dual socket motherboard, memory banks and cabling.
Inside the fleet. Thousands of these.
Rack of network switches with colour coded patch cable bundles dressed into horizontal cable managers.
Switching and patch aggregation.
Fiber optic patch panel with LC duplex connectors and aqua jumpers in a cable management tray.
Fiber patching.
Switch hardware and the aisle it lives in.

// Operations & Compliance

Staffing three buildings in a market with no data center labor pool

Michigan had no existing data center workforce to hire from - a problem the state is about to rediscover at much larger scale. I recruited, hired and trained the operations teams for all three facilities, and built the management structure they ran inside.

Across the estate I led the compliance programs - SSAE16/SAS70, HIPAA and PCI DSS - covering audits, SLAs and policy.

The full Liquid Web staff assembled outside the Lansing data center building for a company photograph.
The people who ran it, outside the building. Seven when I joined.

// In the Field

I could do the work

When you're building from nothing, you do whatever needs doing. I drywalled the first data center, core-drilled concrete for fiber runs, and terminated copper.

That isn't a boast about hours worked. It's why I could read a schedule and tell whether it was real, and why the trades took the drawings seriously.

// Documentation

From the build

Construction-phase photographs from the Lansing facilities.

Architectural floor plan of the Lansing data center showing 741 racks, a generator bank, switchgear and primary switch lineups, cooling units and the office areas.
Floor plan - (741) 24″×72″ racks, the generator bank and primary switch lineup down one side, switchgear, cooling and PDU positions. Office, training and receiving to the west.
Crew placing and finishing a concrete slab pour inside the data center shell.
Slab pour.
Interior of the building shell during construction, steel structure and mezzanine with scissor lifts on the floor.
The shell, before it was anything. We put a 20,000 sq ft mezzanine into this volume to carry additional office space.
Metal stud framing dividing the interior, stacked drywall waiting on the floor.
Framing the rooms out. That drywall did not hang itself.
Mobile crane offloading electrical equipment from flatbed trailers outside the building in winter.
Long-lead gear arriving. Michigan, in winter.

Built in Michigan.

Three facilities, ground up and owner side - site selection through commissioning, and the decade of running them afterward. If you are building one, I would like to hear about it.

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