Internet Data centers provide a secure, high-capacity environment for communications companies and content providers to locate and host their Internet equipment. These centers provide the foundation for a variety of business models and Internet operations. The expertise involved in building and operating a network-focused facility are non-trivial. Even the low-end data center requires both an immediate cash draw and a recurring operations cost. The construction project itself requires months of planning and execution. Like most things, the first time one enters into a new arena, potentially costly mistakes are made.
This BOF will explore the tradeoffs between building a data center and outsourcing the data center to a third party. The BOF will also continue some of the discussions that took place during the Data Center BOF at the 1999 Atlanta NANOG.
One goal of this session is to create the framework to establish a list of "public" data centers, listing the services offered, the center's location, and any additional benefits the center offers its customers.
About the Presenters
As Co-Founder and Director of Business Development at Equinix, Bill
Norton focuses his attention on building strategic relationships among
companies participating at the Internet Business Exchanges. Previously, he
was the Chair of NANOG and Manager of the Internet Engineering Group at
Merit, leading a variety of national and international network research
and operations projects.
Over the past decade, Michael Lucking has worked with several companies building various-sized data centers. His work has included constructing POPs for regional and national ISPs, and large data centers for government organizations. Michael is currently working as a Sr. Network Engineer for Epoch Internet, Inc.