Multi-tenant data center provider Online Tech has completed a US$1m upgrade of electrical and mechanical systems at its data center near Flint, Michigan. The project both increased the facility's energy efficiency and added power capacity.

Online Tech CEO Yan Ness said aging electrical systems in the facility had to be upgraded to prevent unplanned downtime. "As the UPS infrastructure was reaching the end of its useful life, we wanted to replace it proactively to assure no incidents or risk to our client base," he said

In addition to boosting energy efficiency of the UPS system (which went from 80% to 92.5% efficiency), the upgrade increased the facility's critical-power capacity by 100kW, bringing total capacity delivered to the data center floor to 1MW.

Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) units were upgraded to take advantage of the nine-months of free cooling a year central Michigan's climate provides.

The data center – which currently provides 22,500 sq ft of data center floor – was built in 1986 by EDS (now owned by HP) as a disaster recovery site for General Motors, which owned EDS at the time. It became property of Online Tech in 2005, following its acquisition of Gentech, which was then the owner of the facility.

This is one of Online Tech's two data centers. The other one is located in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

In addition to colocation, the company provides managed services and a variety of Cloud-hosting services.