 Think Tech Tech Talks. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech Hawaii. Today we're going to talk about DR Fortress out near the airport. It's got walls that are many feet of concrete thick and it has launched a data center virtual tour which just news it's in advance and Fred Rodey co-founder and president of DR Fortress is here to tell us about it. Hi Fred. Hey how's it going Jay? Yeah great to see you. I remember I went out to DR Fortress in the early days and it was something out of a movie it was. You walked in there and you were ready ready for the action this was this was high tech high security in every way. It was uh you know never forget it actually never forget it and I suppose as you said before the show it doesn't look anything like that now. So let's let's talk about DR Fortress and how it has you know developed in the past what nearly 20 years since I was there. Let's talk about you know what it looked like then and what it looks like looks like now. Yeah so when we first started we were Piano Pacific started in 2000 then we merged with Equinix in 2003 and then we took it over and we did a management buyout me my partners in 2006 to become DR Fortress so we actually just celebrated our 15th year as DR Fortress and then we decided to do this virtual tour mainly because of COVID a lot of people couldn't actually come down and visit us so we put it online and that's how it all started. So we just finished our expansion in 2021 that's on there and then you'll see all the different expansion areas from the last time you were here to today and I invite you to actually come down and get a real tour when you have a moment because it's definitely changed. Yeah I will absolutely you know I consider this a great statement of Hawaii's ability to do high tech to do tech infrastructure. Very important that we can do that not only is it you know great infrastructure for Hawaii but it connects its clients with backups in various different continents. Can you talk about that for a minute? Yeah so we're the hub of the internet for all of Hawaii so we are the internet exchange so we have a switch that all the carriers like Wintel and Spectrum and Lumen and all the local carriers as well as some Pacific Islander carriers like America Small, Telecom Authority, Guam Telecom Authority, Onate from Tahiti. They plug in and they exchange traffic with one another on the internet to keep all the local traffic local and because we have that that hub we also get the content players like the Google's and Facebook's of the world jumping on that as well so you know they put a caching note inside our data center plug in and instead of getting like your iOS update from you know Carpentino in California you actually get it from like an Akamai server in our data center and it makes the internet fast you're not having to go to the mainland and back every single time and then we also have those Pacific Pacific Islander carriers that will plug in so that they get the same experience and not have to all the way to the mainland and back and then we do have other international carriers that will bring customers in for DR sometimes they're bringing in for you know Earth Station activity for satellites sometimes they're bringing in for the telescopes on the big island so all that activity is happening downstairs because they're all of our customers are taking advantage of the carriers that are in here as well as the content. You make me want to ask you whether the Tonga incident last week had any effect. Yeah so we actually got a bunch of emails I don't know how they were emailing us but they were trying to do DR so they were trying to get up and running so I have the sales team working with them as well as some other carriers trying to bring them in but they cut two different cables so I think most of their stuff's going over satellite right now so those guys are going to be hurting for a while because it's going to take a while to get a ship there and then they got to find it where it got cut for two different cable systems. Yeah we hear so much about cables and not that it's relevant but you know there was news about the Russians cutting cables off Ireland and off Scandinavia. It's so interesting how important cables are you don't realize it until you lose one. There's more coming but yeah that's why you trying to lower the probabilities and have multiple cables coming in and out but with you know active god they couldn't do anything about it because they actually did have two separate cable systems get cut. But if you have to you can go satellite it's more expensive but it's still doable. I know we have satellite functionality we're out in why not is it. Yeah so there's several there's actually there's one out in yeah it's like why not area but I think it's all the way up in Keavaula area. There's also one in like Shark Cove up that area I forget what it's called Pupukea and if you go all the way around to the Kapolei area where there's a Hawaii Pacific teleport and a bunch of different earth stations over by the water park and then I think there's also some in Wahiwa so there's different earth stations depending on where it is we have one satellite provider called One Web their earth station is actually on the big island and then they host all of their equipment here. It's so interesting you know you think a satellite dish would point up into the heavens but when you go and look it doesn't point to the heavens at all it points to the horizon it points to satellites that are very far away low to the horizon am I right? Well it depends on what it is but yes you're correct that there are some that point straight up depending on where the satellite is located and some of them are actually pointed towards Asia because those satellites sit kind of in the middle between Asia and us you can only leave the planet once right so you get the planet and it comes down and then it hits fighter because if you leave twice the latency is so high usually the applications will break. Yeah it's but it's it's comforting somehow to know that even if the cable goes bad somehow we have alternatives like the satellites more expensive more difficult but we have them you know yeah so if I want to be your customer I can I can bring my server this is my recollection from back when I can bring my I can I can say Fred hi I'm at your front door which is probably eight feet thick also and I have my server I want to put my server in you know in your facility or you can provide me with this server how does that work? Yeah so several different ways again you can just buy space and power from us and this would become your data center a lot of the banks and hospitals do that and you know they they set themselves up they buy from multiple carriers in here they have choice of different networks like over a dozen of them they can choose so the price is cheap if you don't have your own server you want to go cloud we do have cloud providers in here we have a whole cloud marketplace that can do you know just a virtual server for you know less than a hundred dollars a month and you can come in virtually and you're just buying at that point you know RAM and CPU and storage on demand and you can get as mix and match of whatever you want for that and then they have multiple network providers that go up and then they just charge you based on usage. You know you must you must over the years have seen an enormous increase in the you know relative use of the of the cloud model I mean so much that I do already is I I don't probably have four or five clouds that I'm just an ordinary guy and I just you must see that also. Yeah so the customer is depending on what they're they're doing you know a lot of them are headed towards hybrid so they have some stuff that you can't put in the cloud and other things that hey this application only exists in the cloud and so usually it's a hybrid of both and it depends on what you're doing right so a lot of times you know we're using software as a service on our phones you know like Salesforce or you know different applications social media and whatnot that all sits in like the cloud but there's a lot of applications locally for your business that just don't work like if it's too far away your point of sale system like comes to a crawl and the line starts backing up so they want it local so a lot of times what they're doing is they're just sticking it in their office but we have cloud providers that actually have dropped in our data center so you don't actually have to keep it inside your store or in your office you can actually use their platform and it stays on island and it makes it extremely fast and your application will work and you you could also you do also service people who want backup I reckon I have it anywhere I want but I I'm I mean I'm sending to you and I'm I'm using you as backup and then you in turn have backup elsewhere and you talk about that yeah so we have several different cloud providers that have multiple locations so we have one called cloud sigma they're throughout the US and Europe and so you can pick a server wherever they're at we have another one called stellar they're in like four locations throughout the US and so you can choose a server here and then choose your backup in Chicago or Arizona or wherever else they have their their locations should you actually just pick a drop down select where you want that content to sit and again you can do primary or you can do backup and then we have some customers that actually do active active so it doesn't matter which one is on you're going to go to the closest one that's up cool so you know I think tech has like 70 software pieces and subscriptions that it relies on to do its thing so I think about software a lot but you must think about software more than me because you have to stay current on all it's not just a matter of presenting somebody with a with a box and a cable no no no you have to know about all this don't you yeah I try to stay up on it we have a lot of partners that you know they they stay up on what's happening in terms of what the customers are using who they need to get connected to and so I'm in a lot of those meetings so I get to you know through osmosis trickle that information like what people are doing what's hot in the market you know the latest thing is bare metal so we're going back to what used to be you know your virtual private servers they can now do that like cloud so instead of just buying you know the ram the cpu and hard drive space on a platform that's cloud they can do physical servers that way so you can have something provisioned within like minutes and it's specifically your own server you know based on how much ram and storage you want you click on it and then it's a physical box that you actually have access to so you can even run your own vmware platform and build your own cloud off that bare metal so all of those new technologies usually were kept abreast by our partners and our customers yeah well you know that your comment reminds me of the fact that people use virtual private networks a lot more now than they used to and you you sit at what amounts to a dumb terminal they haven't used that term in a while but it's a dumb terminal doesn't do much but it connects virtually with anything anywhere and you're operating some other computer do you see that happening is it happening more yeah so it's always that you know goes away from you and then back to you so that whole you know cycle happens where a we don't want anything on site we want to you know put it put everything in the cloud we want everybody to have like virtual desktops so that you know if you lose your laptop doesn't matter the content actually was there as on the server now it's like going back to where oh i kind of want more power on my laptop i want it available offline so i can be on an airplane you know so you're pushing it a little bit closer to the edge but you're still leveraging the cloud so that you know you you have the the best of both worlds so it just depends on you know what your company and what cycle they're in but yeah it it no longer is dumb terminals it's usually you're using something powerful you know even your phone is like more powerful than what those dumb terminals were back in the day going back to a mainframe but it's going to something similar where there's a lot more processing power on the cloud because you're using servers as opposed to i can't really do the number crunching on my phone but i need access to that that data that the server is crunching but then i need to actually see it on my phone so i can present it to a client or do my job yeah it's really remarkable how sometimes you can't even tell the difference between you know programs that run on your machine and programs that are running somewhere else the only thing as far as i can see is that if it's running in your browser it's not on your machine and it can do extraordinary things but it's not on your machine anyway let's let's get down to the virtual tour okay so tell us why you did this how you do did this when you did this and how it works yeah so we did this during you know we got acquired 90 of our our company is actually owned by a infrastructure fund called gi partners they're out of the the mainland there's over 30 billion dollar fund created a couple billion dollars sub fund and we were their first investment and one of the board members said hey um because of kofi want you guys do a virtual tour uh since nobody can go leave their house but you know they they want to see your data center and so we worked with a company that actually does it and they sent the guy that does all the photos for google in hawaii he came and he did 360 shots with his camera specific sections we didn't do the whole data center because it gets a little bit ridiculous with 50 000 square feet but we did some main sections so that you could actually drop in either to kind of watch the video of the pictures or if you want to like click on it you can spin around and see 360 views of different areas throughout the data center so you can get a feel of the data center so you're seeing a lot of it our engineer is operating that i wonder if you could give us a you know a little sound to describe what's happening yeah so he's actually in the lobby and so our customers can actually scan their eyes come into the lobby but if they want to go through a second door there's a dual authentication process so they check in with security they relinquish their ID they'll get a card and then they scan their eyes plus a card to get through the second door and then you can actually click i think through the door and go to the next area we don't have appropriate permissions he's going back out now so that's outside okay and then here's another area of the data center you can actually spin that around and look down the rows and whatnot that's hot out containment system so we're not mixing the hot and the cold but you can see how big the data center is and this is just one section so we have i think like five sections now that look like this and that's different technology depending on what the year was that we did it so that when you come down i'll show you everything but on this virtual tour we just picked a certain segment so that customers can actually see like you know how big it is and you know what the technology is for the cabinets that we're using hot out containment that cable trays and power so can you go to a segment that's just another view of the same area that's the part of the token realm over here is a kiosk that they can borrow so they can do their debt on arrival testing of their equipment they can you know we have a lot of customers that are from different countries they just need a place to hang out we can even run cables to that room so they can actually um work from there and be connected to their cabinet if they want to and then we have a few other rooms like that upstairs on the third floor see if you have three floors at all yeah so there's three different floors there's two floors of actual data center space there's this is another segment we just finished this this actually looks different now because we had a large 5g um provider come in and we built them a whole section and they have their own cabinets their cabinets are huge they're like eight feet tall normally we use seven feet tall cabinets those are eight feet tall and normally ours are like two feet wide there's our like three feet wide and they're like 48 inches deep they're just this giant beast um that we actually had to bring in but this is the newest area that we did and we could go up to like 18kw per rack um in this design um but yeah we did a really cool floor design uh rosa picked that out that's our cfo and my other co-founder and then for our subroof we painted a white uh just to break in up the place but um like this was in the middle of our build so everything's not in yet hot out containment wasn't in yet but now there's like a bunch of like customers in this this area so it was good that we we got to take a photo before we'd finish you know i i don't i don't see a lot of wires here um so is the uh where are the wires are the floor the ceiling where are they yeah so they're in trays and so this is actually the ups room so we just um this is a new lithium ion uh ups system is a 1.25 megawatt a and b system so we brought that in it it's for um it's what cleans all the power to the customers and then if we were to lose power it'll hold the um the power for the customers for like 45 minutes after like 13 seconds the generators turn on synchronize and refeed the facility but we have it just in case something happens um has a longer ride through so this is this is different than an ordinary living space and i think we should tell people exactly how different it is and what kind of systems you have to keep it clean and resilient yeah so you know if you were at your house uh and you like turn on the ac sometimes you see the lights flicker like servers do not like that and a server is a computer that doesn't have a keyboard monitor and mouse it's just the the processing unit and you can fit a bunch of them those cabinets that you saw and then when you are on your web browser and you're looking at um you know google or you're looking at your whatever you're looking at you're actually looking at that content that's sitting on a server inside a data center like ours so what we do is we make sure that the power is clean so like if the ac is turning on and off you're not getting that dirty power so all of it's coming through that ups or uninterruptible power supply and we have a huge one like 1.25 megawatts that's like enough to power a neighborhood we have that just for a little 50 000 square feet um location so like we have a million square feet of this park and our little area is like the same amount of power that they use for like the park so it's it's a lot different and then you got to make sure that if we do lose power the ups will only last for 45 minutes so you need a generator to actually refeed it to keep it up and running so we have switch gear that actually controls if we're getting power from the generator or the utility and it's automated so we don't have to be here to actually turn them on it automatically turns on if it loses power and it'll refeed the facility in less than 13 seconds so yeah that's what the customers are paying for they're paying for the security right because we have banks and hospitals and whatnot that you don't want somebody to walk away with your server um and then you're also paying for the cold area that we're trying to keep it nice and cold because servers you know if you left your phone inside your car um it would heat up and it would shut itself off to prevent the CPU from melting the servers are the same way it needs to be at a certain temperature so it's pretty cold in the data center you wouldn't want that at your house but not too cold because you don't want condensation to happen inside the area um and there's a specific humidity um levels that we try to keep it at um we follow all the ashray standards and whatnot and then you have all of the carrier sitting inside the data center so that you can plug into whatever carrier you want and that saves them a ton of money right you normally can only get like um spectrum or wine tell at your house um or use your phone for you know your 5g and whatnot here we have all those guys sitting next to you and you would physically plug into them so you know we have we have one piece of equipment it's a it's a transmitter and it uses half a dozen modems and and uh it's Israeli this thing is quite something it's called live view it's a professional piece of gear and that the half a dozen modems are all bonded up into one high speed line sort of it takes the fastest speed of of the collective and gives you the fastest speed you can get much faster than any one single are you using that or do to your customers use that where you bond up a bunch of lines together yes they can so normally what they do is they have a router and usually these routers are huge um like the spectrum has these routers that are taller than me and it's like one device and and those are terabit routers so um you know these carriers are buying and selling from each other inside the data center so you know if you're using that at your office you're probably you know plugging in you know 100 meg maybe gig so our customers buy like 100 gig thousand so it's just a different scale right because they're actually servicing you at your house so um they're having to do you know 1.4 million people everybody's like using their phone or they're using you know their spectrum or combination they're using your wi-fi at the airport they're using it at the hotels all of that needs to like get on the internet and that's where this is that we're sitting basically at the hub of the internet for all of Hawaii so those circuits are way bigger than what you can get at your office or your house wow what about the air you know I mean if you have a sense of electronic equipment you have to have a certain purity of the air and just so how do you achieve that yeah so you know we don't allow it when they first move in you know the other going to have cardboard or whatnot but we don't allow them to just keep that cardboard out there you're not having a bunch of paper like you have your your office creating all this dust but we have filtration systems that are actually hitting the computer room ac's and it's filtering out the dust and then we have regular cleanings of the data center because you don't want dust going inside and clogging up like if you've ever seen your computer in the bag there's a bunch of dust on that fan like it's not good for your computer and if you want that to to not accumulate so we have really clean air we have customers that need specific temperatures so we're at 71 degrees plus or minus three degrees that's kind of what we're trying to keep the the data center at and then we have specific humidity levels that we're trying to stay within as well because you don't want condensation to happen or you want to dry right because if you walk up and you are statically charged and you touch your equipment you can fry your gear so you will ground out all the cabinets and make sure that the humidity is not too dry or too humid wow it's a whole new world isn't it and and the cabinets are all locked in other words if i'm company a i don't want company b getting into my cabinet because it you know that can wreck my whole business that way um so each one is locked in the and company a has is the only one with access is that the way it works me what's the way do you separate it for security yeah so they're either in their own cage and they'll have like a key lock or biometrics to get in uh and the other way is a cabinet so you saw all those black cabinets and each one has its own combination lock and then the customers um you know if they let go of an employee we can it go and change that combination lock is you know it and why is so small usually you go from one company to the next it's the same it guy coming to our data center but they're working for a different company uh so they'll call us and say can you change out our locks and we'll change out the combinations for them because they may still have access to the data center in that area but then they won't have access to that um changed lock yeah and by the same token not every not every person can get in yeah it's specific so we have an online portal they'll tell us what level of access that individual has um can they bring in equipment can they bring in visitors can they order services and we just enforce it they keep the log uh live and then if they do come in uh they do a digital signature and a lot of banks and hospitals hey we didn't audit who came fourth quarter we can actually send them that log and it has everybody's signature that actually logged in for their area well this sounds really you know important for Hawaii businesses especially institutional ones who can't achieve this without you and need it all of it all the things we've been talking about but you know it's also a statement as I said before of the ability of of our our our tech community to provide this kind of service are you the only one or are there other data centers anywhere close to your size yeah so there are other data centers one until has one uh there's another one out by the water park and then there's one in Mililani and then there's a bunch of uh data centers that companies um have themselves inside their offices and whatnot um but I think our closest competitor maybe has a couple hundred cabinets we're like 600 cabinets and growing so another expansion yeah yeah I wanted to ask you that I mean this is a this is this business you're talking about has got to be increasing because people rely more and more on computers every day we know that and you know it's a it's a center of most businesses to have computing power the way they couldn't operate without it and so they got to be coming to data centers like yours um you know on an increasing basis and that will continue COVID or no COVID that will continue maybe COVID makes it continue faster I think so the question is what do you do when they come to you in droves and you know you don't have enough space for them or or you don't have enough space for the collective of them you know going forward you got a plan of course but what's the plan the fourth story you have more land uh and is this does this equipment get smaller as we go forward the answer is yes to all of that so they the equipment is getting smaller um you can you have more on your phone now than what you used to have in your laptop 10 years ago um in terms of the amount of storage it can do but again like you just use your phone as an example like you don't delete any content you're taking video or taking pictures you're telling email emails and whatnot uh you just don't get rid of that content you can imagine the scale that companies are doing that right uh how much um inventory management you're doing all of your CRM applications you know hospital patient records it's just constantly growing your apple content your facebook content it's just it never shrinks it only grows and even though the equipment is getting smaller it's taking more power um and they need more equipment because again even though it's smaller it's taking a less footprint it's always constantly growing and so we're trying to stay ahead of that so we just finished that one section that you saw our expansion space last year and now we're at like 70 capacity maybe a little bit more like 74 uh so we're already looking and our current location we're we're basically going to have to move our neighbors um and pay them to move but we're also looking at a second site so either through acquisition or a purchase of a building and then doing a retrofit um but yeah we're constantly needing to stay on top of not the not hitting the 80% mark in terms of our capacity fill rate um so again we were at 70 I think 4% when we did our last expansion and then because of the customers coming in so quickly we're at that level again so I'll be doing this year another expansion. This must give you a certain amount of gratification Fred you know I mean it's it was a roller coaster there at the beginning but then after a while you know you could see this was going to be a big deal and um and you've been there the whole time how do you feel about that? This is your baby Fred. Yeah everybody asked me when I'm a retire I'm like I'm I'm too young but yeah I'm getting up there in years and uh my wife wants me to retire but I really love doing what we do it um you know we're really impactful for the community we're one of the pillars for technology like I said we're the hub of the internet for all of Hawaii and so we're just trying to do like you know what's going to impact our generations we're moving from success you know success to significance and you know that's what you know gets me up every morning and yeah it's super exciting. Yeah and all those people out there anybody who would watch this video would say hmm hi of the internet today Fred Rooting made that happen. I don't know about that. I thought it was important that you did that right. So Fred uh I really appreciate you coming down for this discussion uh just tell everybody what your website is uh so they will know and maybe they can look further maybe can see the virtual tour um what what what would be the website? Yeah so you can go to www.drfortris.com and oh thanks and there it is and you can also give us a call so on that link uh you can come down for a physical tour it's actually way better than the virtual tour because it will show you everything um and it's uh 50,000 square feet so you'll be walking for a while uh but it's definitely worth your time you know there's nothing like in Hawaii. So bring your walking shoes when you go to see Fred there that's the bottom line thank you Fred. Fred Rooting uh co-founder and president of DR Fortress thank you so much. Yeah thanks Jay. Aloha.