When I pulled up to 35 McGrath Highway in Somerville, just a couple of doors down from Sav-Mor Liquors, all I found was a squat, brown, windowless concrete building and an unpaved parking lot. It was a hot day in mid-July, and I was searching for a new data center company with the geeky name [2N+1] (the brackets are part of the name). But there was very little about this old building, wedged between the McGrath overpass on one side and weed-lined railroad tracks on the other, that looked high-tech.
But in the computing world, I reminded myself, data centers are about as unsexy as it gets. They aren’t about software—the flashy Web-based games, social networking and media-sharing services, or business systems we often write about here. They aren’t even about the hardware that runs the software—the gleaming, blinking racks of blade servers from the likes of HP or EMC. Data centers simply provide space, electricity, cooling, and connectivity for that hardware. They are, in other words, the technology behind the technology behind the technology; as long as the power is on, nobody notices them. The less flash, the better.
Which is why I concluded that I must be in the right place. I stepped over some construction detritus, went in the unmarked door, and met two of the founders and principals at [2N+1], Vincent Bono and Will Locandro. They showed me into the conference room. As it turned out, this was one of the only finished spaces in the five-story building. But the flurry of remodeling would soon be over, Bono assured me. “We are 30 days from launch, and we have customers ready to move in on day 31, literally,” he said.
The construction didn’t faze me, since I was visiting [2N+1] to find out what it takes to put together a brand-new data center—or, to be more exact, a “colocation center” (also known as a “carrier hotel”) where multiple companies that have run out of room or power in their own facilities put their extra server, network, and storage gear. Though I’ve been writing about information technology for a decade, this is one corner of the business I’ve never really explored. I’ve been wanting to fill that gap recently—in part because data centers are now at the heart of so many companies’ IT infrastructures, and in part because the idea of “cloud computing,” or trusting computing jobs to far-away resources that are administered like utilities, is catching on so fast.
But there’s also another, more personal reason: our recent experience with hosting provider The Planet, which suffered a huge electrical explosion on May 31 at its main data center in Houston, where Xconomy’s own servers are located. We got through the crisis okay, but it left me wondering how the heck data centers work, anyway, and what can be done to make them more reliable.
Bono and Locandro seemed pretty qualified to educate me. Not only do both gentlemen have a long history working for local infrastructure providers—Bono as a network and data center designer for data centers HarvardNet and Boston Datacenters and fiber network operator Global NAPs, Locandro doing sales and business development at Cabletron, Riverstone Networks, and Enterasys—but they’d just spent months retrofitting this hulking pre-computer-age building for up to 22,000 square feet of server equipment, largely on their own dime.
The most important thing about the former furniture factory, Bono and Locandro explained to me right away, isn’t the fact that it’s virtually fireproof, or that its steel-reinforced concrete construction can support bone-crushing loads of 400 pounds per square foot on the upper floors and 2,500 pounds on the lower floors, or that it has its own 15,000-gallon diesel fuel tank, big enough to keep backup generators running for four days. No, the most important thing about it is its location. The neighborhood may look inauspicious to passers-by, but it turns out that underneath those weedy railroad tracks runs a valuable resource—fiberoptic cable. “Here’s Boston and here’s Cambridge,” says Locandro, gesturing at a map. “Pretty much every ounce of fiber between the two cities runs down these tracks.” That enables [2N+1] to tap into fibers owned by every major network provider, making its facility carrier-neutral—which appeals to customers who may already have a contract with the likes of Verizon, Qwest, Lightower, Cogent, or Level3.
Just across the tracks, moreover, is a facility owned by NSTAR, the Boston area’s largest electrical utility. “There is a lot more that goes into looking for a location than just finding a big, empty, concrete building,” says Bono. “Not only do you have to be proximate to fiberoptic resources for multiple carriers, but you need to
