Data Center Tours: Iron Mountain BOS-1, Northborough, MA

The Iron Mountain BOS-1 Data Center is a colocation facility with 21,000 sq. ft. of usable floor space and 3.6 MW of power, with significant potential to scale up on its 58-acre campus.

Rated to withstand Category 4 hurricane winds, the compact BOS-1 sits along a quiet, widely spaced technology drive at 171 Bearfoot Road, in the Boston suburb of Northborough, Massachusetts in Worcester County.

As a ten-year old colocation facility in the New England area, "it's a little different," says Brunetti.

"We built small because the power is very expensive up here," he says. "Generally, if a customer comes to us or one of our competitors, they're going to say, we have 40 cabinets, but it's really expensive to put 40 cabinets here. But we want to touch ten of them on a monthly basis. So they'll install ten here, and then take another 30 to another data center where power is a lot cheaper. Plus we've got some customers that have an entire data center right here."

"We've got enough land here to create another two data centers just like we've got," Brunetti adds. I ask a nearly rhetorical question next, which is whether that's definitely going to happen. "If we get the customers, yeah," he says. "If we have an anchor customer, we would gladly build another building."

From the NOC to the Dock

Before the data center tour starts in earnest, we poke our heads into the BOS-1 Network Operations Center. Inside the NOC, mounted on the wall facing us is, in strictly technical parlance, a much larger than average video wall.

"We're always adding, as we create more dead spots and spaces, we'll add more cameras to pick up footage," explains Brunetti. "They hit 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We run our staff to cover the 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. slot, then anytime after that, it's an on-call situation. Most of the guys here live within 15 minutes, so they could be here pretty quick if there's anything that they need to do."

The BOS-1 Data Center's roster of compliance includes certifications for: NIST 800-53; FISMA HIGH; FedRAMP; CMMC; SOC 2 Type II, SOC 3; PCI-DSS; HIPAA; HITRUST; LEED Gold; ISO 9001, 27001, 50001, 14001, 22301; and Uptime Institute Tier 3 Certification.

"Compliance is a huge thing with our customers," notes Brunetti, adding, "We are constantly being audited. It's something that we're used to. We're really good at it. We never have any issues here. A couple of times a year, someone's coming into audit, and our customers get audited as well. So then we've got to supply most of the information to them too. We're just so used to it - and the customers like that."

We pass through the facility's loading dock area and several nearby work bays. Spare filters for the rooftop air handling units are stacked in a storage area. "We debox here," says Brunetti. "We don't allow cardboard in the data center, so a lot of the boxes come off right here. In this other workspace, they can bring a rack down and fully load the rack in a nice comfortable space."

"I have three guys on-site in my ops team," he continues. "One is a master electrician and the other two have been in communications for probably almost 30 years combined. We do a lot of stuff ourselves. If we can't handle it ourselves, if we're too busy, we'll have a contractor come in, obviously, but we try our best to save money where we can."

BOS-1 Notes: Power and Cooling, Fire Suppression, Lighting, Generators, Supply Chain

Designed as Boston’s first-ever LEED Gold multi-tenant data center, Iron Mountain BOS-1 employs waterless cooling to save millions of gallons of water annually, and uses 100% renewable power.

"When the building was built, we were a bit ahead of the game," notes Brunetti. "It's all about redundancy. We're N+1 for our AC systems, for the generators. We have two humidifiers. We've pretty much got an extra one of everything. It's diesel generators for backup power and a UPS system to pick up that in between time."

The local power utility serving the facility is National Grid. "They're actually a couple doors down from us," says Brunetti. "That's their national call center, which makes this a great neighborhood to be in. We're the first ones to come back up with power in a storm if they do go down. So this was a great place for Iron Mountain to build a data center."

"They put this building together in about seven or eight months," he adds. "If we did have another customer, we would add another building onto the side and the hallways would match up. And we already have all the taps in place as part of the original construction so it wouldn't interfere with customer uptime. You wouldn't have to shut down the building to add a tap to the next building. It's ready to go."

The BOS-1 Data Center's strategic location in a leading FLAP [Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris] market also offers access to 37.6 total MW of renewable power.

"We have the Starline system, which is a huge highlight of our data center," adds Brunetti. "The Starline allows us to add and remove power easily. We can change it out. If we had a customer that needed to upgrade their power, we could simply add a power disconnect right next to their old one, and they can at their leisure swap over to their new power plan. Then once they're done, we can go in and remove that without any downtime.

The Iron Mountain BOS-1 Data Center's fire riser room also contains the facility's lighting rack and security system. The immaculately dressed lighting rack employs Power over Ethernet connectivity with Category network cabling powering the facility's every light.

"This system here saves the building I think almost 60% on power compared to a traditionally cabled building," says Brunetti. "If all your lights are running on 110, you're sucking up a lot of power. All these are LED, I can control every light, I can make them dim to whatever levels, it's completely customizable. We save a lot of money with that. It's another LEED Gold thing."

We enter the data center's MEP [mechanical, electrical, and plumbing] yard to inspect the facility's two megawatt diesel generators, one on each side of the yard. Housed in heated hurricane shelters with 4000 gallon tanks, a full load of fuel accounts for about 72 hours of runtime.

"They are quarterly maintained," adds Brunetti. "We run them before storms during the winter. These are heated and closed." There's one giant fan at the backside of the enclosure. Louvers on either end open up when the generator operates, as air flows through to cool the entire engine.

Outside the generator shelter, my attention is directed to where BOS-1's four rooftop AC units employ compressors that use a sealed fluid system for cooling. These 120 ton packaged air handlers are Trane and Tele Pack units.

Brunetti observes, "In a data center, we're trying to conserve power. We're not trying to light up all four compressors if we don't need them. So we've added a VFD [variable frequency drive]; what that allows us to do is light up one, two, three or four compressors, whatever the building calls for. This is also N+1. If I had a full load in the building, I would be running three units or four units at 75%. That way if I needed to work on one, I could put the entire building load on three units and work. On the other one. Work on the one you just shut down."

I asked Brunetti about supply chain issues throughout the pandemic up until now.

"It's almost back to normal - almost," he says. "The high priced items still take a long time to get. Like if I needed to get a monstrous water pump or something like that, it would take over a year. I know a couple of my counterparts throughout [Iron Mountain] have had issues getting large parts like cooling towers. And it's like a two year wait for a generator and stuff like that, the big stuff."