As we enter the Fall months it’s kind of hard to imagine that we are well into the third quarter of 2017.  So as the seasons change and summer gets further behind us, we at OceanTech wanted to take a few minutes to look back at our year-to-date and review few of the projects we’ve taken on and what we’ve accomplished. In a broader view of the world, we saw a few things in the first part of the year that we hadn’t seen in decades; a total solar eclipse is one that immediately comes to mind.  We saw the Dow Jones with an all-time high and we saw technology advancements in the area of self-driving cars along with “Smart Homes” with appliances and gadgets that operate by voice commands. There is little doubt that we are part of a unique time in the world where if you aren’t ahead of the technology curve, you might already be behind your competitors and needing to play catch-up.For OceanTech and the world of Data Center Decommissioning, our year has gone right along with what the rest of the world has experienced. We saw some things we hadn’t experienced in years and we’ve tackled projects that allow our clients to stay ahead of the curve as their industries grow and change. At OcenaTech, we have recently developed some patent pending technologies that allow us to better service our clients. We continue to receive some of the highest certifications in the industry so our clients can be assured their data and equipment are being handled safely, decommissioned and destroyed properly and recycled responsibly.As with most years, we removed some older equipment that might fit right in at a science and technology museum and we’ve removed technology and hardware that was not very old and still efficient but our clients felt the time was right to invest in newer and faster systems that allowed them to save a significant amount of money, reduce the space they needed for the equipment and ultimately helped them to grow their business.Our team made a couple of trips to the Arizona desert during the year. The first time was to do a full-scale decommissioning of a datacenter in Phoenix where we handled Cisco network gear and servers, Hitachi and Supermicro arrays and APC racks. Our second trip of the year to Arizona was for a project for a nonprofit corporation with a large call center along with two data centers, one located in Phoenix and the other in Denver. The call centers serviced multiple educational institutions across the country and the project included removing some 700 monitors, 800 phones and 500 desktop computers that were spread out over the 50,000 square foot call center. From the datacenters in Phoenix and Denver, we removed Dell, Cisco, Supermicro, and HP servers along with Cisco network gear.We also completed numerous projects north of the border in Toronto, Canada. Our technicians are comfortable making sure all the details that come with completing a project outside the United States including complete documentation of all materials that need to come through customs and imported into the US are done properly and efficiently so not to add additional cost to our customers.  One of our trips to Toronto was for the deinstallation for a satellite office of our client.  Our team removed Cisco network gear, Dell Servers, HP and Dell desktops and Lenovo laptops all of which needed to be packed and prepared to clear customs and be imported into the United States.We also handled many projects in Virginia where our technicians worked in live environments where they “decabled” and removed only specific servers from the datacenter sites for a CDN service provider. This was a multi phased project which included a third site, which was in Miami, where we again worked in a live environment. There are many challenges working within a live environment as only specific pieces and specifics cables can be removed while others need to remain fully operational. Our technicians need to be extremely diligent in making sure the servers and cables that are removed are the proper ones as not to cause an unplanned interruption to our client’s operation. The last thing we want is for our clients to experiences down time because of a mistake made on our end.One of our Fortune 500 clients, an American software company, also had a project that involved multiple locations. The decommission was done in waves and spanned over several months as systems and equipment were taken out of service. It involved Hitachi and Netapp arrays, Dell and HP servers, Cisco and Juniper Network gear from one site and then Dell, HP and Supermicro servers from a second site along with Cisco Network gear and Dell, HP and Acer desktops. Our technicians also removed desks and worktables thus taking a fully operational data center down to just the empty racks.We also took on a removal project for a publicly traded company with a datacenters throughout the country including one in Las Vegas.  The internet-based company had Dell, Sun, Microsystems, Cisco along with custom branded servers that needed to be decommissioned and removed. Overall, we removed semi-truck loads of equipment from the Las Vegas location. This was phase one of the decommissioning for this client. We’d move to phase two later in the year at their Santa Clara, CA location.  Phase two was a partial decommission and once again involved our techs working in a live environment.  They identified and again removed multi semi-truck loads of equipment from this location including Dell, HP and Sun Microsystems servers along with Cisco, Juniper, Cyclades and Avocent Network gear.We handled a full decommissioning for a large Twin Cities based insurance company.  In a single day, our team took a fully operational data center down to bare floor, removing all the servers, battery backup packs, cabling and racks.One of our clients, an international automaker, was relocating their US headquarters from New Jersey to Georgia.  We were brought in to not only handle the removal of the decommissioned equipment but also the deinstallation, packaging and shipping of the equipment that would be reinstalled in the new company headquarters in Atlanta. We removed HP, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Dell and Apple servers along with Cisco, Avocent, Adaptec and D-Link Network gear and our team separated the equipment for recycling from the equipment for reuse which then needed to be packed and shipped to their new headquarters in Georgia.Another data center project was for a Twin Cities based client. The datacenter was located in Colorado and was a full decommission project where we removed Netapp arrays, HP Blade Centers, HP servers and Cisco Network gear.It’s been a very busy and productive 2017 so far for everyone here at OceanTech. This year has brought us many new projects from some long-time partners along with some new accounts that allowed us to grow our team and company. As technology continues to improve in capacity, capability and speed while physically the hardware continues to gets smaller and more compact, many of our clients find that by investing in the newest of technologies and equipment they not only become more efficient but if the equipment they are replacing isn’t totally outdated, we can help them receive optimal value by reselling it for them.