If data centres and secure hosting environments make you yawn then this post might be best avoided.
We all know that you want your hosting to “just work”, so you really don’t need to know about the “inner works”. I don’t blame you.
Personally I find data centres to be incredibly boring places.
They’re not “exciting” or “cool”. Sure they can look pretty funky from the outside, depending on which data centre you’re looking at, but that’s just aesthetics.
Aesthetics don’t provide security.
Fancy brochures don’t guarantee uptime.
Slick sales pitchs don’t provide a track record.
Investment in infrastructure and staff may not be “sexy”, but it is a necessity.
I don’t have to get excited about data centres and I’m not going to be distracted by glossy photos. The kind of stuff that does impress me is the physical infrastructure and the reputation which is why we use Interxion and Data Electronics.
Over the past year we’ve been hiring staff on a constant basis while also spending silly amounts of cash on building out the network. At times I wish we’d held onto the cash so that I could get myself a really nice car or a down payment on a nice big country pile, but instead we’ve invested it all back into the company.
The photos below show one of our private suites in Dublin. As you can see there’s plenty of space available for expansion. We’ve put aside quite a bit of space for our “big” plans.
In the photo below Mark, one of our technical staff, is working on a server.
The monitor is rackmounted into the cabinet and connected up via a fancy KVM which allows technicians to work on any server within the cabinet easily. It probably saves on space too!
While here you can see Niall working on his laptop in one side of the suite.
A lot of the servers pictured above were first seen several months ago when we shared our Dell delivery photos.
The guys were moving stuff around last night in readiness for our new product launch (watch this space!)