When looking at a company from the outside, one rarely gets the full measure of the business. The same is true when one considers Nxtbook Media. We’ve been called “the Google of Lancaster” for our technology solutions and avante-garde vibe, and our stand-up meeting rooms have received some press for their health factor. From the outside, Nxtbook looks like a cool company that does a lot to incorporate fun, teamwork and creativity to what we do. But to get the full measure of the company, you must understand the strategy behind the decisions.

Take our server room: at first glance viewers are hit with the wow-factor of the LED lights. But according to our Director of System Administrations, Don Spidell, the intentional design and structure of the room is critical, and the lights serve to highlight that room’s importance. To help explain, Spidell wrote the following:

When the decision was made to move Nxtbook to a larger space, we knew we’d have to design a server room for our networking equipment, phone system, and servers.  Rather than go the traditional route and put everything in a small closet that no one ever sees, we wanted to make the new server room a showpiece.  Neat and tidy server rooms make it easy to understand how things are set up and it makes it easier to diagnose and fix problems when they come up.  By putting a glass door on it and making it something that people would regularly see, we would have incentive to keep it well organized.

We started designing the room with the basics any server room should have — a moisture barrier under the drywall, dedicated electrical circuits, a dedicated air conditioning unit, and sensors to detect water, temperature, and humidity levels. Besides making it functional, we also wanted to make the server room look very unique and visually appealing.  We painted the pipes Nxtbook colors, added colored LED accent lights around the network racks, and installed a shiny black floor.

We’ve seen our share of server rooms while doing IT consulting for local companies and the biggest issue we see is the tangled mass of cables running to and fro.  Performing maintenance and troubleshooting on a network with a spaghetti mess of cables is nearly impossible, so we wanted to avoid that.  We color-coded things by having the electrical installers run white CAT6 cable for our voice network and blue CAT6 cable for the data network.  We made sure the cable runs and cable patches were bundled properly and were of the proper length.  We mapped out what’s connected where so anyone would be able to decipher it.

There’s no denying that the server room looks stunning. The dramatic affect of the lights shining on the metal and black flooring attracts attention and deeper scrutiny, which, as Spidell writes, contributes to the accountability for keeping the server room spotless. But there’s a significant benefit to the company in keeping the server room organized: regular maintenance and quick response to potential issues hinges upon being able to quickly identify which cables and servers belong to which networks and products. If your server space is a mess, resolving issues yourself or with an outside IT professional would be time consuming at best, and require a complete overhaul at the worst.

While the aesthetics of the server room might be the first thing that catches your eye, the strategy behind the room is what leads to Nxtbook Media’s record of 100% uptime for our solutions and products, and what makes Spidell’s job a little less complicated.