Bob Evans Farms, LLC owns and operates more than 550 family restaurants in 19 states, primarily in the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and Southeast regions of the United States. Through its BEF Foods segment, the Columbus, Ohio-based company is also a leading producer and distributor of refrigerated and frozen convenience food items under the Bob Evans and Owens brand names. Its restaurants are open beyond typical business hours and span multiple time zones, so its critical IT infrastructure can never go down.

As Bob Evans grew over the past decade, its data usage and IT needs grew with it, and storing and optimizing IT equipment in-house became increasingly difficult and expensive. New equipment was outgrowing the space and power available in the office building that housed it.

While assessing its options, the company identified four factors that would significantly improve the performance of its IT systems. It needed more space and power. It wanted greater power and cooling efficiency, because energy efficiency lowers monthly utility bills; according to the U.S. Small Business Administration, infrastructure investments that improve energy efficiency regularly achieve a 30 percent return on investment. It needed reliability, since restaurants open beyond typical hours across multiple time zones cannot tolerate downtime, yet building a proprietary data center with the power, network and cooling redundancies required for 100 percent uptime would be prohibitively costly. And it needed scalability, with a flexible way to adjust the scale and configuration of its equipment quickly and easily.

Outgrowing its ability to maintain infrastructure in-house, Bob Evans needed an Ohio data center where it could securely colocate, achieve greater performance and benefit from valuable energy efficiencies.

Bob Evans colocated with Cologix Columbus, a purpose-built data center situated at the convergence of Ohio's long-haul and regional fiber networks. The company fully tailored its IT footprint, customizing rack space and power layout within a private cage deployment, and gained continuous security over critical equipment in a facility that maintains SSAE-16/SOC-1 and SOC-2 Type 2 annual audits.

Cologix Columbus has maintained 100 percent uptime since its 2007 commissioning, largely because of 2(N+1) redundancy on all critical infrastructure. Redundant components take over if a piece of equipment fails, and an entirely independent end-to-end system is always active for automatic failover, all operating without human intervention and rigorously maintained, tested and audited.

Designed to achieve LEED certification from the U.S. Green Building Council, the facility delivers a leading power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio. It averages 20 kW per cabinet across a 32,000-square-foot raised floor, with 27-foot ceilings, tri-level cooling and natural heat stratification. Each UPS system parallels six 200 kVA Liebert NX modules with a 1.2 megawatt paralleling switchboard, allowing greater than 98 percent utilization of utility and generator input power, and three cold-water loops, high-efficiency chillers and variable-frequency-drive air handlers keep redundant cooling below 10 percent of total power draw on average.

The move was made through the AEP Ohio Data Center Program, which pays cash incentives to corporate users that transition into energy-efficient data centers. AEP Ohio, which had asked Cologix Columbus to be a strategic partner for the program, assessed Bob Evans' potential energy savings, assisted with the pre-application process and educated the company on all incentive payment options.

• AEP Ohio verified actual energy savings against the legacy baseline and released incentive payments based on annualized savings
• Fault-tolerant, highly redundant environment designed for 100 percent reliability, with 100 percent uptime since 2007
• IT costs reduced further by sharing overhead with other colocated businesses
• Audit and compliance made easier by leveraging Cologix Columbus' annual SSAE-16/SOC-1 and SOC-2 audits
• Direct access to over 30 national and regional networks for carrier choice and service provider redundancy
• Local account managers and on-site 24/7 support, plus flexibility to customize and scale the IT footprint