Swanson Rink had a busy 2014 holiday season bringing joy to Volunteers of America’s Bannock Youth Center (BYC). We hosted the annual BYC holiday dinner on December 18th, which was complete with plenty of food and a visit from Santa Claus. This is a great opportunity for our employees to get over to the center and meet with the program staff and participants. This year, several Swanson Rink employees also opted to be a part of the “Adopt-a-Family” program, from which young families in need are able to obtain new Christmas gifts to be placed under the tree.

Our big holiday event this year was the “Adopt-a-Program” drive, which differs from “Adopt-A-Family” in that donations are given to the organization as a whole, not just individuals. Swanson Rink chose to sponsor the BYC’s program and participant needs for the 2015 year by holding a drive in our office for items needed. These items ranged anywhere from dish soap to TVs, but there was no shortage of anything on the list. A friendly competition between interoffice teams brought in hundreds of items for the center. Our employees went above-and-beyond bringing in donations, and even donated strollers, Wiis, cell phones, and other useful items that were not on the list! The BYC was happily overwhelmed by our response to their needs.

Swanson Rink is grateful for the opportunity to continue to serve the community through our involvement with the Bannock Youth Center and is thankful for our wonderful employees who continue to make it possible!

Robert (Bob) Yester, PE, Executive Vice President is retiring from Swanson Rink on December 31, 2013 after serving the company for 38 years. Mr. Yester has served in many roles at Swanson Rink including President from 1985-1992, but he is most known as an expert in electrical engineering for mission critical data center facilities.

For almost all of Bob’s career he has provided consulting engineering for the design and renovations of data centers for large and small companies including Comcast, Centurylink (including work under US West and Qwest), Safeway, Lockheed Martin, Federal Express, Viawest, Sabre and United Airlines to name a few. Bob Yester’s design concepts have been published in multiple national publications.

In 1988, Robert Yester, designed one of the first major dual power path data centers in the country for US West (now CenturyLink) in Omaha, Nebraska. This “system + system” concept was cutting-edge during the time and this data center was one of the first two data centers to be built with this new technology. When asked about this project, Mr. Yester commented that while a simple concept, “as they say, the devil is in the details, and there are a lot of details.” The dedication to diving into detailed design is what Mr. Yester is known for and the foundation upon which he built the Swanson Rink data center team.

More recently, Bob has been recognized for his work on the ViaWest Lone Mountain Data Center where his team developed a Uptime Institute Certified Tier IV electrical design with a target PUE of 1.2 utilizing a modular concept that allows capital expenditures for infrastructure to be aligned with the needs of ViaWest’s customers and also minimizes stranded capacity.

When asked by our clients what attributes they admire of him, it was his ability to engage with the client, listen to their needs, and develop solutions that meet those specific needs.

“I have had the unique opportunity of having been both first a client of Bob and then his design associate for the past 20 years, so I have watched and experienced how Bob can make every client feel that they were his most important client. He relishes the opportunity to explain how systems work and did it in such a way as to bring each of his clients into the conversation regardless of their technical background. His ability to listen to the client and then develop a solution to meet their needs is legendary.”
— Gary Orazio, PE, President, Swanson Rink

In 2013, Bob transitioned the management of the data center electrical team to Dan Heggem, PE, Vice President who has worked under Bob for over 23 years. During the past year Dan and Bob have worked together to ensure a smooth transition process in preparation for Bob’s retirement in December. Gary Orazio, PE, President will continue in his role as Project Executive overseeing Swanson Rink’s Data Center Practice, providing mechanical engineering leadership and leading data center business development, positions in which he has served for the past 20 years.

No one person can replace Bob, but he has trained a team of engineers to continue his dedication to detailed engineering. He will be missed by everyone at Swanson Rink.

Swanson Rink is known for being a leader in the data center industry and this year we have been busy speaking on trends and topics from coast to coast and everywhere in between.

Swanson Rink President Gary Orazio was part of the panel for the “High Energy Efficiency! Low Workplace Effectiveness?” discussion at this year’s annual Uptime spring conference. The Uptime Institute Symposium was held in Santa Clara, California, and welcomed over 1,300 attendees and nearly 100 speakers and focused on the overarching topic of “The Global Digital Infrastructure Evolution.”

Gary also spoke with Bob Yester, Executive Vice President at Swanson Rink (who boasts more than 30 years of expertise in the data center industry), at the 7×24 Spring Conference in Boca Raton, FL, on June 5, 2013 on the topic of “Performance Challenge: Tier IV, PUE 1.2 Modular Build Out.” The basis of this presentation was how Swanson Rink was able to help the ViaWest Lone Mountain Data Center achieve Tier IV Certification while maintaining high reliability and substantially lower energy costs than the traditional IV facility.

If you would like see one of our data center presentations, Gary Orazio and Bob Yester will be speaking with Dave Leonard of ViaWest at the July 24 AFCOM Rocky Mountain Chapter meeting on the topic of “The impact of design assumptions on data center cooling.” This topic will also be presented at the AFCOM Phoenix meeting on August 23.

Swanson Rink is currently working on the Concourse C West expansion design at Denver International Airport, consisting of approximately 57,000 enclosed square feet of new construction on two floor levels. In addition to the new construction, the work includes moderate renovation at the west end of the existing structure, including interior upgrades to the existing hold-rooms to provide continuity and transition between the new and existing buildings. Swanson Rink is currently providing mechanical and plumbing engineering, special systems design, life safety, fire protection design and engineering, security systems engineering, communications and data systems engineering. Swanson Rink is teamed with Wong Strauch Architects for this project, having previously worked with them on the Denver International Airport On-Call Concourse Design Services.

You might recall reading about the Swanson Rink staff working together on tables for our new office back in January… Now it’s time to reveal the finished product!

After four months of hard work, the much anticipated walnut tables have arrived in the Swanson Rink offices. How did these tables come to be? The idea of crafting our own wood tables had been tossed around by company executives and managers during the preliminary visioning sessions for the new office back in the summer of 2012. Almost immediately everyone knew this was a job for Jim!

Our “jack of all trades,” Director of Information Systems, Jim Flint was able to acquire 20 year-old stock walnut that had never been used, for a steal of a price. He enlisted the troops and got to work. Swanson Rink’s Chelsey Lange, Michele Hendrick, and Andrew Alger joined Jim to cut the 1” thick walnut boards down to size. The next step was milling. (Jim just so happens to own of a 20 foot, 30 year old French sliding panel saw that is great for milling.) The saw uses 3 phase power and weighs about 4,000 pounds! After Jim and Andrew completed these steps, came the sanding, staining and finishing of the boards. The final touch was that each table was hand polished with a bees wax/carnuba finish.

The table bases were inspired by a combination of parson tables and the metal swirl design of the stainless steel at DIA. The bases were welded and a swirl finish was ground into the steel. Each table was designed to support upwards of 1,000 pounds!

Extra fun tidbit: These conference tables were so large they had to be hand carried up the stairwells and one even had to be placed on top of the an elevator car and brought up to the 12th floor through the elevator shaft!

Thanks again Andrew, Michele, Chelsey, and Jim!