Cloud Computing on Ulitzer

Thursday, I was fortunate enough to get to walk around Equinix’s DC-4 datacenter in Ashburn, VA. In this 100,000 sq ft data center, there are carrier, equipment, and software agnostic, providing clients with energy, space, and cooling – allowing choice of carrier, equipment, and software.  Their huge facility (just one of 5 at the site – totally over 450,000 sq ft) allows you to link up with your telecom of choice.

Equinix’s facilities are impressive, from biometric hand scans, motion detecting cameras, and locks on cabinets, they are engineered to (physically) keep the right people in and the wrong people out.  Equinix keeps the servers in cages allowing for your cage to be separated from all others with handprint entry only.  Due to the fact that so many firms are collocated in this facility (300+), Equinix is serious about their security.

Equinix’s infrastructure is fed by numerous high voltage cables to Dominion Power, but in case of an outage, they have rooms full of batteries, 2MWatt generators, and 500,000 gallons of fuel ready to go.  I heard that during a store a few years ago, Dominion Power was having a hard time getting the full workload up – which led to them asking Equinix to run off of fuel generators all week. Equinix was capable of managing their load and maintaining operations the entire time.

PowerVPS, a webhosting provider sponsored the evening.  PowerVPS provides 3 key services to clients.  They have Fuse, Force, and Ignite packages that provide hosting and bandwidth to webusers of varying needs.  PowerVPS can scale up or scale down your services to meet your need – from just small simple webhosting to a full server under your control.  These capabilities provide your firm with elastic IT, which can be extremely helpful in forecasting and limiting expenses.

PowerVPS and Equinix enable firms to achieve capabilities of a full datacenter, but without investing the overhead required for a full datacenter.

Check out Equinix here.

Check out PowerVPS here.

Related posts:

1. Cloud computing and my small business
2. See Inside a Google Data Center and a Google Server
3. Steve Ballmer and Cloud Computing