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Remembering Exodus

Exodus Communications left its imprint on the data center industry. One of the company's founders recalls the company's growth during the dot-com heyday.

Exodus Communications left its imprint on the data center industry. It had the highest profile of any of the data center builders during the dot-com boom, and made the loudest thud when it filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Exodus' "gold-plated" data centers lived on, getting bought or leased by companies including Savvis, Google, DuPont Fabros, Cable & Wireless, Sabey Corp., Freddie Mac, Deutsche Bank and many others. A LinkedIn group for Exodus Alumni has more than 1,000 members.

So I thought our readers might in Sramana Mitra's interview with Exodus founder B.V. Jagadeesh, who is now the CEO of i/o virtualization company 3Leaf Systems. Jagdeesh discusses the development and history of Exodus, including its move into its first major facility, a 15,000 square foot site in Santa Clara:

That was the true birth of the Internet datacenter. In August of 1996 we were halfway through our move, and there was a massive power failure west of Utah because of a grid failure. This area was badly affected. We had a generator, so our brilliant marketing guy made a very big deal of it. BBN, which was based in Palo Alto, went down. They were a government-funded facility and they went down. We had ads blasting in the newspaper, ‘When the whole world went down, Exodus had the lights on.’

The interview appears in six segments, with the discussion of Exodus starting in part three, and continuing in parts four and five. Jagadeesh left the company in 2000 to work at NetScaler.

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