A few weeks back, we discovered that we'll need a new location to host our CPLUG box. Ours is on a T1 at a local company now, but they're redoing a lot of their Internet infrastructure. It'll be somewhat difficult for them to continue our free service.

So, we put out a call for assistance, to see if someone else could host our box. , who had come up to the CPLUG Security Conference (all the way from VA), said that his company would be able to help out. He works for someone I had never heard of, Carpathia.

Grateful for the offer, but not knowing anything about the facility and unsure about having to drive two hours to get there, I waited a bit longer to see if we'd get other offers. I'll get to that later -- but it soon hit me that there was no reason we couldn't place a box down there, even if it was just a backup. So, while preferring to have our primary box within driving distance, it seemed to make sense to take advantage of his offer.

He had gone a step further and offered us a tour of the data center they're in, provided by another company I had never heard of -- Equinix. It sounded like fun, so five of us drove down there to tour the facility and drop off the server.

It was shortly after we arrived that I realized I had grossly underestimated what it was we were being offered. The Equinix facility was huge. You can see a picture of it here. The main datacenter is the large building on the north side of the picture. This datacenter was being used by other companies like Yahoo, Amazon, Capital One, AOL, Verizon, Microsoft (the Windows Update servers), AT&T, and numerous others. There were so many servers inside that you had to shout to be heard. And we saw a bit of everything, Dell's, Compaq's, Sun's, Xserve's, and more. We saw a few servers so large that they were labeled "UNIX Silo's".

Access to the facility is quite secure. It requires a pin and a hand scan by an authorized person to enter the building, and the individual cages that are inside (within a cage is an organizations servers).

They have six gas powered generators in case of a power failure. They also have room after room of batteries for a series of UPS's that they have to keep everything alive until the generators come online. They have two 20,000 gallon tanks of fuel to power them. Further, during an outage, fuel trucks will come once an hour, keeping the fuel no lower than 75%.

A lot of this is also explained on Carpathia's Website, where they give info about the datacenter, including a virtual tour. Apparently, we missed the video game section while we were down there. There's a room off to the side containing video games an pin ball machines :-)

The kicker is that Carpathia has a huge pipe, and is right on the Internet backbone. Our box has a 7GB connection available to it, has a faster ping time than Yahoo or Google -- and is also less hops than Yahoo or Google. Yikes :-)

I'm eager to get this box into production, it doesn't have all our stuff on it quite yet. Thanks to Bob for his generous hosting offer and the tour he gave us.