[cs615asa] CS-615 Meetup - iO Data Center

[Mark Wilson]

Hello All-



For my meetup, I attended a tour at the iO Data Center in Edison, New
Jersey. The first thing I would like to say is: WOW. There is over 800,000
square feet of property with approximately 213,000 square feet being
utilized for the data center. The iO Data Center is UTI Tier III Design
certified, which means that there is 99.982% availability, leaving only 1.6
hours of downtime per year. Additionally, Tier III states that there is N+1
Redundancy which means that there is enough power to operate the data
center and also enough power to provide backup power. With the growth of
virtualization and off-site data storage, this facility provides a more
than adequate solution to any company’s needs.



Many of the things we have been taught in class were seen being implemented
at iO. First, in order to actually gain access to your rack or racks of
servers, there are at least seven security checkpoints that must be passed.
These range from a physical security guard checking credentials, swipe-card
allowing you to access a certain part of the data center, and biometric
(fingerprint and iris) scanners.  Additionally, racks are stored in modules
which are temperature controlled and on a raised-floor. Throughout the data
center, there are over 400 modules, each containing approximately 20 racks.
There are four quadrants throughout the facility, each that house around
100 modules. While on the tour, we were only allowed to walk through one of
the quadrants. One key point that was made during the tour is that they are
looking to expand inside the data center to allow for more modules. This
would allow for more smaller companies to have off-site storage at iO. In
addition, in order to help in disaster recovery, there are 8 backup
generators powered with diesel fuel, and the fuel is all stored on site.



This event provided me with practical exposure to a high-level data center
and the intricacies of what needs to happen in order for it to operate
smoothly and consistently. I attended this tour with some of my co-workers
as my place of business considered storing some of our data in this data
center.  That being said, this event was chosen based on practicality and
because I find large data centers and how they operate to be very
interesting.



This tour allowed me to use lessons that were taught in this class in order
to understand the reasoning for the things that were happening at iO. This
includes security, both physical and virtual, to backup and disaster
recovery, to seeing the neatly wound CAT-5 cords from rack to rack. iO Data
Center is a System Administrator’s dream of what they want their data
center to be. Overall, this event has been a very educational and
enlightening experience that will allow me to carry over what I have seen
and learned to my future and career. I would recommend everyone to take a
tour of the iO Data Center, you will not regret it!



Thanks for reading!



Mark Wilson



Reference Links:


https://www.io.com

https://www.io.com/data-centers/new-jersey-data-center/
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