13
2008
Co-Location Center
A Co-Location center is a data center which has been broken into multiple spaces so that it could house servers from many different web hosting and dedicated server companies. This is very much like what happens in the shared web hosting market where a server will be parceled into pieces and each piece will serve a particular web hosting client. Just like the server which is parceled into different spaces so is the data center parceled to accommodate many hosting environments, not all of the parceled areas of a co-location facility are for web site hosting or dedicated server hosting, some may be for other hosted applications.
A good example of a co-location facility that some of us out here on the west coast used to work in is the co-location facility at 1 Wilshire in downtown Los Angeles. This facility, at the time, was the third most connected building in the world. The security at the facility was extremely tight as were the backup procedures for power, security, maintainance and all other aspects which are crucial to a data center. The one Wilshire facility had previously been a mainstay office for lawyers in Los Angeles but as the building grew more prominent in the data center space the lawyer offices were eventually all moved out and the building’s primary clients were all hosted applications or hosting providers.
One day while some of us were working at our data center space in the facility we heard an incredible roar and then looked out our windows to see the backup generators of the building roaring to life. Many of us were scared, including myself, because of the thought that the facility could be the object of a terrorist strike and the date was 4 years and a day after the strike against the World Trade towers. On this day on September 12th 2005 Los Angeles had experienced a major power outage caused by a mistake by a DWP employee which caused roughly half of Los Angeles to lose power for several hours and in some parts for more than a day. The building’s back up generators acted exactly as they should have and when the power interruption hit the building the secondary power from the backup generators kept the building powered up & the servers still working.
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