Turnkey

Scoping & Hardware Design

Every Turnkey engagement begins with a detailed scoping session with our engineering team. We map your entire data operation: daily capture volume in terabytes, number and type of storage devices (SD cards, HDDs, SSDs, CFexpress, NVMe drives), datacenter location and available rack space, target cloud provider and region (AWS us-east-1, ap-south-1, GCP europe-west1, Azure westus2), compliance requirements, and retention policies.

From the scoping output, we design a custom hardware specification. Each server is purpose-built for your throughput target: 5-bay USB 3.2 Gen 2 hubs (10 Gbps per port), dual NVMe SSDs in RAID 0 for a high-speed buffer (5+ GB/s sequential writes), dual 10GbE or 25GbE NICs with failover (Intel X710 or Mellanox ConnectX-4), 64 GB DDR5 ECC memory, IPMI/BMC for remote management, and redundant power supplies in 2U rackmount chassis. The spec is tailored — a team processing 500 SD cards per day needs different USB hub topology than a team ingesting 50 multi-terabyte HDDs.

Procurement & Burn-In

We procure all hardware from tier-1 vendors — Dell, Supermicro, HPE — through our established supply chain relationships. Procurement lead times are typically 2-3 weeks for standard configurations. For deployments requiring expedited delivery or specialized components (100GbE NICs, high-capacity NVMe drives, extended-depth chassis for specific rack types), we maintain buffer stock of commonly requested parts.

Every server undergoes 72-hour burn-in testing in our staging facility before shipment. Burn-in runs sustained I/O stress tests across all USB ports, NVMe drives, and network interfaces simultaneously — simulating worst-case operational load. This catches infant mortality failures (DOA drives, marginal memory, flaky USB controllers) before hardware reaches your datacenter. Servers that fail burn-in are replaced with fresh units. After burn-in, we install and configure the OS (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS headless), apply firmware updates, configure network interfaces, deploy DataBridge Core with your specific configuration, and label each server with asset tags matching your inventory system.

Shipping & Installation

Servers ship pre-configured in rack-ready chassis with protective packaging rated for international freight. We coordinate directly with your datacenter operations team — providing rack elevation diagrams, power requirements (typical: 2× C13 per server, 500W sustained per unit), network port assignments, and cooling specifications. For international shipments (Mumbai, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Singapore, Sydney), we handle customs documentation and work with freight partners who specialize in datacenter equipment.

On-site installation is coordinated remotely or in-person depending on your location and preference. For facilities within our operational footprint, our field engineer handles physical installation — racking servers, connecting power and network, validating connectivity, and running the initial smoke test. For remote facilities, we provide step-by-step installation documentation and join a video call while your datacenter team handles the physical work. Either way, every server is verified operational before we move to software validation.

Network & Cloud Connectivity

We provision the dedicated private network connection between your datacenter and cloud provider. For AWS, this means Direct Connect with virtual private gateway, BGP peering, and S3 Gateway VPC endpoint configuration. For GCP, Cloud Interconnect with Partner or Dedicated connections. For Azure, ExpressRoute with private peering. Circuit provisioning takes 2-4 weeks depending on provider and colocation facility — we start this process in parallel with hardware procurement to minimize total deployment timeline.

For facilities with on-net cloud providers (Equinix, CoreSite, Digital Realty, NTT, Cyxtera), we provision cross-connects directly within the facility — no last-mile ISP dependency, lowest possible latency, and highest reliability. Turnkey deployments include redundancy planning: dual circuits where your throughput SLA requires it, or automatic failover to encrypted internet backup for cost-sensitive deployments. We size the circuit based on your peak throughput requirement plus 20% headroom — a 10-server fleet running 5 lanes each at 10 Gbps needs aggregate bandwidth well above 50 Gbps to account for upload bursts and concurrent verification traffic.

Ongoing Operations

After go-live, the Turnkey tier includes full 24/7 operational management. Our engineering team handles software updates (zero-downtime rolling deployments, one server at a time), fleet monitoring via DataBridge Watch, automated alerting with severity-based routing, incident response and root cause analysis, capacity planning as your data volumes grow, and hardware lifecycle management including proactive drive replacement before failure based on SMART monitoring.

You get a dedicated support engineer who knows your deployment, your team, and your operational patterns. Monthly reviews cover throughput trends, error rate analysis, cloud cost optimization (S3 Intelligent-Tiering, Glacier lifecycle policies, Direct Connect utilization), and capacity forecasting. When your operation scales — adding capture devices, expanding to new geographic locations, targeting additional cloud regions — your dedicated engineer designs the expansion plan and coordinates the entire process. The Turnkey experience is designed so that your team focuses entirely on data capture and usage, never on pipeline infrastructure.

First Turnkey Deployment: Human Archive

Human Archive is DataBridge's first production tenant and the deployment that shaped every design decision in the platform. The operation processes hundreds of storage devices per day across 10 ingest servers in a dedicated datacenter facility, uploading egocentric capture data to AWS S3 us-east-1 via dedicated Direct Connect circuits. The pipeline handles SD cards, HDDs, and SSDs in parallel across 50 concurrent ingest lanes, with every file SHA-256 verified and every status change logged in a complete audit trail.

This deployment validated the Turnkey model end-to-end: hardware specification matched to throughput requirements, server procurement and burn-in, pre-configured shipping, on-site installation, Direct Connect provisioning, software deployment, operator training, and 24/7 ongoing operations. The lessons from Human Archive — USB flap detection, buffer drive health monitoring, automated retry for transient S3 errors, batch-level progress tracking — are built into every DataBridge deployment.