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!