Deploying cloud and dedicated servers in Internap’s Santa Clara, California data center – Part one
Here at Voxel, (by the way, now an Internap company) we’ve always wanted a California data center — something close to the Silicon Valley tech hub where so many of our startup and web 2.0 customers live, work and sell. But as a previously New York-based infrastructure company, with only 50 employees and a lot going on, we were never able to cost-justify deploying enough gear and staffing as well as enough smart guys and gals in California to make the jump. All that changed a few months ago when we became part of the Internap team — suddenly a West Coast hosting facility was an eminent reality. Internap has a company owned, top-tier data center in the heart of Santa Clara, CA, and a good portion of the cloud engineering and managed hosting support teams work out of the office space.
About Mission College Boulevard
The Internap Santa Clara facility is located strategically in the heart of Silicon Valley, a few shorts miles away from the original “super” data centers on Mission College Boulevard. This hyper-connected Silicon Valley data center building has been built to the highest standards of availability and safety by an Internap “DC Ops” (data center Operations) team that is truly second to none.
The facility boasts:
- Utility power via two discrete electrical grids and substations (PSE&G and Silicon Valley Power)
- 3 x 1.5 Megawatt Caterpillar generators, 4 x Liebert 750kVa UPS systems and true A/B power redundancy
- 2 x 1100 ton cooling towers and redundant, N+1 condensed water cooling systems
- 36,000 square feet of raised data center floor space
Overall, our team couldn’t ask for a better place to rack and stack a few thousand servers and power our cloud and on-demand dedicated server offerings.
The Internap Crew
When you work in data centers all day long like I do, you really start to appreciate the people who build and maintain these huge, always-on, “never-can-fail” facilities. It takes a special breed of engineer to spend a majority of their waking hours inside a temperature-controlled box of power circuits, fiber connections and whirling fans — and like it! But I can tell you from experience that it makes all the difference in the world when you, as a customer, show up to install your equipment.
Lucky for me, the Internap Santa Clara team is a truly dedicated group of professional site operators — the facility is immaculate, the pride in each installed cabinet, cross connect or power receptacle is clear, and our crew always had extra hands on deck from the data center site staff to help us deploy our West Coast dedicated server and cloud hosting installation. A special shout out to Matt Brown and his DC Ops crew in Santa Clara for all of their help — it looks nice to see you standing next to so many of our servers!
Looking for data center services in the Bay Area? I’ll have my guys hook you up. Schedule a private tour today. In the meantime, stay tuned for my post tomorrow on how data center location comes into play when shopping for cloud services.
