Not Your Typical Data Center Lobby

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Not Your Typical Data Center Lobby

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Not Your Typical Data Center Lobby
- By: Rich Miller
  July 14th, 2009
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Data centers have earned a reputation for underwhelming exterior design. Most facilities tend toward the ”bland bunker” look, foregoing a flashy facade in favor of a focus on utility and security. But not all data centers follow this path. The front lobby of the Datapipe data center in San Jose, Calif. features a glass-enclosed atrium, as seen in the photo above. There’s a spectacular interior perspective posted on Flickr by Daniel Hoherd (check out the large version).

Tom

Posted July 14th, 2009

Uhh, AboveNet built that datacenter a long time ago (first dotcom boom time) and then proceeded to get rid of it in BK. Don’t give Datapipe the credit eh?

Rich Miller

Posted July 14th, 2009

Thanks for noting that, Tom. In fact, the large exterior sign atop that glass atrium still says “AboveNet.” Here’s our coverage of DataPipe’s purchase of the facility in 2006.

Fernando Sousa

Posted July 15th, 2009

If you think this Data Center lobby is nice, then take a look at this photos from Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (aka Mare Nostrum) and tell me what you think of it.

http://www.bsc.es/plantillaA.php?cat_id=124

Caroline

Posted July 15th, 2009

Is architecture relevant? I believe a Data center has to acknowledge security aspects. Besides, it seems a little expensive for my servers. Meanwhile this California sun being so hot… it must require more cooling and therefore more electricity. But I suppose this was all considered..this glass atrium looks so “green”…

Michael T. Halligan

Posted July 15th, 2009

Rich,

When I worked at Napster in ’2000 we hosted most of our infrastructure there. This used to be a building called “San Jose Live” which was a block-long sports bar.

The best part of this datacenter red-head brigade. For whatever reason, the women who manned inside the “fish bowl” were all attractive, giggly early ’20-something redheads (both real and clearly from a bottle). It was refreshing to flirt with a pretty girl at 4am after 14 hours struggling with a router failure or a site upgrade.

Other great aspects were the Irish Pub next door, and “Above Secure” which was AboveNet’s failed attempt at selling ueber-secure datacenter bunker space at a high premium. AboveSecure was neat, as it was essentially a bank fault, with armed guards patrolling 24/7. I’m fairly certain nobody ever actually hosted there.

Around that time was when Microsoft attempted Hotmail’s first failed transition from FreeBSD to Windows NT. For three weekends in a row, let’s just say you’ve never seen more discouraged and defeated looking engineers in your life.

Other bits of nostalgia:

- BigWords, the “college kids with American Express-funded startup” was in the cage across the row from Napster. We were very happy to take that space over when they went under
- AskJeeves (The first and second incantations) were in the cage next to us. Apparently they went bankrupt a few times and had ridiculous turnover in their Ops team
- Layer42 started out in that facility (I might be wrong on this, but I know that’s where I first met Steve Rubin).