Bridgestone reopens expanded data center

By Kyle Brown, Crain News Service

AKRON — Bridgestone Americas Inc. celebrated the grand re-opening of its Akron Data Center, which centralizes all of the company's five data systems into one location, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on April 18.

The 10,000-sq.-ft. renovated building will have approximately 80 IT (information technology) employees, as well as an additional 60 employees in a print shop housed in the building. The floor plan includes space for future expansion, according to the tire maker.

Currently, the facility has the capacity to hold 3.5 petabytes of data and is home to 3,000 servers, both physical and virtual.

The $17.3-million renovation project began in July 2015 and was completed this past February, with a focus on including natural disaster precautions, such as redundancies in power feed, generators, power distribution, cooling systems and network.

"With a business as large and diverse as ours, our IT infrastructure is part of the backbone of what we do every day," said Robert Olds, acting chief information officer for Bridgestone Americas. "It's not only our people, but our processes, our systems, our hardware, everything working together with the business to keep things rolling."

The data center centralizes Bridgestone's data systems from its locations in Muscatine, Iowa; Carmel, Ind.; Bloomingdale, Ill.; Clearwater, Fla., and Nashville, Tenn.

Some of those data centers will be repurposed while others will be decommissioned, according to Bill Thompson, vice president and senior officer for Bridgestone Americas.

Bringing all five data systems together helps the company by providing better stability and faster support for business, as well as improved disaster recovery plans, Mr. Olds said.

Though the Akron Data Center officially was reopened April 18, the changes to bring all end-users onto the same network have been ongoing during the last two years, according to Ryan Schulz, IT communication specialist.

"At this point, we are fully functional and running, and we ran this facility through the entire construction process as well," Mr. Schulz said. "The amount of downtime was significantly less than we had anticipated when we made all the moves."

End-users should notice less downtime with the new data center and an increase in reliability, he added.

The data center is connected to two different power grids and is equipped with two separate generator systems, Mr. Thompson said.

Its location was chosen strategically as the safest geological point from a natural disaster standpoint. The IT department also has upgraded digital security within the center, and processes have been set in place to make future maintenance and transitions easier.

The renovated center is more environmentally friendly, with a cooling system that uses outside air to cool the center. It only requires mechanical cooling when the outside air is above 70 degrees.