A Visit to Iron Mountain s Boston Data Center by Jay Livens

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit Iron Mountain's Boston Data Center which is currently under construction. I have been to multiple data centers over the years and the techie in me always finds every visit intriguing and this experience was no exception. What made this trip particularly interesting is that the building is in the final stages of construction and so I was able to get an insider's view into areas that are often off limits in a production data center. In this blog post, I will highlight elements I found interesting will include links to images that I captured during the visit. If you want to go straight to the pictures, head to the Flickr album although you will miss my brilliant commentary.

Security

The facility is highly secure to ensure that customer information is protected. One nice feature is that the loading dock is in the front as pictured here and is right next to the secure entrance. This may seem curious until you realize that the design allows trained security personnel to closely monitor both the entry/exit doorway and the loading dock in a consistent and reliable manner. Of course, there will be cameras as well, but direct visuals adds to security. Furthermore, physical security will be handled by dedicated Iron Mountain employees and so just like you trust Iron Mountain staff with your critical tapes, you can feel confident of our data center security teams adhere to the same rigorous background checks and security training.

Backup Power

Naturally the facility is fully equipped with a redundant power in case of an unexpected interruption. Interestingly, the site is supported by two massive and redundant diesel generators and either could run the entire data center on its own! You can see the external view of one here and a view of the rear of the facility with both generators (hint: the generators are the large containers with the black exhausts on top). We also got to look inside the generator and it was a massive green engine. To be honest, I really wanted to press the big red button, but thought better of it!

Power Centers

Another element of redundancy was internal power distribution which runs through rooms we call Power Centers. The facility has two power centers, an orange one and a blue one. Every power cable in the data center is colored orange or blue to indicate which Power Center it comes from. You can clearly see this in this image of two circuit breakers, one for the orange system and the other for blue. This is a great strategy because it clearly illustrates where cables come from and where to start troubleshooting in the unlikely event that an issue arises.

Multiple PDUs

Naturally the redundant power design extends all the way to the data center flow where we have multiple transformers for both orange and blue. In this image you can see the actual data halls and the orange and blue transformers. It was a bit messy as they were load testing and in case you were wondering, those three boxes in front were testing power. Basically, those nondescript gray boxes were being used to stress test the power cooling infrastructure and would draw huge amounts of power which it would convert into heat and thus test both power and cooling neat! Fortunately, everything passed as expected! The interesting part of this picture is that it illustrates the commissioning process. We test and retest every system multiple times prior to opening the facility to customers.

Office space

When outsourcing a data center, many companies want more than just data hall space. Typically our customers ask for either temporary or permanent work space so that there teams can have a place to work if/when they are required to visit the data center. Our facility design includes traditional workspaces and in this image, you can see this area under construction. I particularly like the large front facing windows and what you don't see are the multiple offices along the left side of the wall. The door on the end takes you to a conference room which will also be available for adhoc or scheduled meetings.

My visit to Iron Mountain's newest data center in Massachusetts was very memorable. The design, combining LEED Gold certification and Tier III status, is truly impressive. However, I think it is the small things that make a big difference and I was particularly intrigued with the key design elements in the area of security, redundancy and manageability. Overall, it is an exciting facility and I am looking forward opening it for tours to future prospects and partners.

LINK:	http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2014/service-lines/data-backup-and-recov...
	See more stories from ironmountain

Most recent headlines