If you’re looking for the Internet, it’s in a warehouse off Grand Avenue in Franklin Park, near 25th Street and the train tracks, not far from O’Hare. Or at least part of it is.
Chicago-based IT infrastructure and cloud storage provider SingleHop officially opens its new data center Tuesday in the above-mentioned near-west suburb. Built at a cost of $30 million and home to the humming flow of data for more than 5,000 customers around the world, it’s not the sort of place one will be able to walk into and look around. But the folks there were nice enough to offer a tour Monday, to show off their new toy and explain how this cloud thing works.
Turns out that once you get past the whole access-to-your-data-any-time-from-anywhere thing, the cloud is pretty much about redundant power supplies, air conditioning and security. Neatness also helps, to avoid the mother of all back-of-the-machine cord jumbles that could happen in a place like this.
“I’m kind of OCD when it comes to cords,” said SingleHop VP of Product Jordan Jacobs.
Good thing, since server farms are rack after rack after rack of metal units, each about the size of a pizza box, with more 10 miles of multi-colored cables keeping them connected to the Internet, to various network support functions, and to a multi-layered power supply designed to withstand any power interruption.
Watching over it all is a Network Operation Center that handles all manner of potential problems, from server functionality to cyber attacks. SingleHop co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer Daniel Ushman explained that the big screens in front of the center normally track customer data, a display that wouldn’t do during a public tour. Up on the wall instead was a world map, showing real-time visualizations, in the form of comet-like streaks of light, of cyber attacks.
“Those are distributed denial-of-service attacks,” Jacobs explained, referring to the practice of hackers using multiple servers to try to shut down web traffic to a specific site.
The SingleHop employees staffing the center seemed to have it all under control, despite the steady stream of attacks the screen was showing. Jacobs said they mostly were there to monitor the servers in the room down the hall, detecting any problems in real time and dealing with them immediately.
Prior to the Franklin Park center, SingleHop’s Chicago facilities were spread over two locations, one downtown and the other in the suburbs, he said.
“This is a big deal for us,” he said. “It lets us concentrate our staff in one place.”
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The company also has server storage facilities in Arizona and the Netherlands, he said.
Although the company is headquartered in the Loop, Ushman said he enjoys visiting the storage center.
“I love coming in here,” he said, as Jacobs leaned into the iris-scanning security device that allowed the tour to proceed into the heart of the facility. “This is the back of the Internet that nobody knows anything about.”
Anyone who has ever felt the heat of a laptop after even a short period of use should understand the need for air conditioning in a room that can house up to 20,000 servers, each of them containing four hard drives. This explains the six massive air-handling units outside the rack room, each of them connected to two fully independent power sources, as well as a back-up generator.
The need for cool air is so pervasive that the floor of the facility is one giant, cold-air pressurized duct, Jacobs explained. Each row of server racks rises above a perforated floor, blowing a steady stream of cool air to keep them from overheating.
An array of appliance-sized battery units in another room is even more impressive when one realizes they exist merely to keep power running for several seconds, or perhaps as long as a few minutes, between a power failure and the moment back-up generators kick in.
Above each row of servers are two large power strips, one painted black and the other white. Both are completely independent sources of electricity, one tied to the Maywood electric grid, the other tied to Franklin Park’s.
Jacobs explained that access to the cage that surrounds the servers is heavily restricted, and that special permission was granted for Monday’s tour.
“Please walk very carefully,” he said, pointing to the blinking servers. “These are people’s businesses; people’s livelihood.”