Employee-owned Thrifty White Drug has over 80 store locations in Minnesota, North Dakota, Iowa, Montana and Wisconsin. When hiring and expansion prompted a move from the company’s old headquarters in Maple Grove, MN to a new location in Plymouth, MN, Vice President of IT Matt Ode recognized a unique opportunity to create a more effective, redundant, and fully scalable data center,” says Ode. “Our initial contact with 2NSystems was as a service provider for our APC power equipment, but we quickly recognized that they had a lot more to offer. We were impressed by their response time and design work and with service that consistently exceeded expectations.”

Project Included

  • Redundant UPS solution – APC 30KVA UPS
  • Redundant Power Distribution to racks using Dual Starline Busway
  • Redundant Cooling to support the room using APC InRow units
  • 450kw Generator to support the entire building
  • Server and network racks from APC
  • Metered Rack Power Distribution units
  • Project Management
Thrifty White

THE CHALLENGE

The new data center was to be designed from the ground up with full redundancy and room to grow. Because all aspects of the move would be taking place more-or-less simultaneously, implementation would require a high degree of coordination, both within the data center and with other aspects of the move

THE SOLUTION

“We selected 2NSystems to provide battery backup, electrical busways, server racks, cooling equipment, and the backup generator,” says Ode. “They had to work around various contractors and tight schedules, but were great to work with and coordinated well with all the parties involved in the project. The biggest lesson we learned working with 2NSystems is that they are data center specialists, so on our next project we’ll avoid some problems by also having them handle mechanical and electrical installation and fire suppression.”

THE RESULTS

“The results have been fabulous,” says Ode. “We’ve had 100 percent uptime for a year-and-a-half. I know that no matter what may happen we’re covered, so I sleep a lot better than I did when we were in the old facility. We’re planning a new data center in Fargo, and 2NSystems is already working on the layout and design.”