Super-Networking Blog

Well we had a jam-packed day full of datacenter tours yesterday. We drove all over Minneapolis and St. Paul to look at 6 different datacenters. 10 Hours of touring and talking about places to co-locate some of our equipment.

All of the datacenters we visited were quite different, both in the facilities and the people of managed them. I am going to go through some of the highlights of all the datacenters we visited yesterday.

-TWTC (511 Building, Minneapolis)

We took a look at their old co-location space and the new 10,000 sq foot space they were building in the 511 building. They had a pretty nice layouts, the air conditioning wasn’t bad, the security wasn’t bad.

They don’t offer any managed services but it you need a cheap place to locate some equipment and you have the man power to manage it go for it.

Still nicer than having your own datacenter since they take care of the AC/Power/Security of your equipment for you. They have generator backup power, UPSes, no raised floor, fire protection was dry pipe only.

-Sunguard (511 Building, Minneapolis)

We took a look at their enterprise class datacenter in the 511 building and it was pretty impressive. They take a lot of steps to ensure security of your equipment, they have an onsite 24/7 manned NOC onsite.

Everything was very clean, very professional. They pushed their professional services a lot and it was clear that they wanted you to use all of their managed services you could because that is where they make their money.

They had plenty of air conditioning with a raised floor, they had a fire suppression system as well as dry pipes. Generator backup power, redundant everything.

Very nice datacenter.

-Honeycomb (Minneapolis)

We took a look at this datacenter and I would have to say it was the most interesting setup we saw. You pull into a neighborhood that doesn’t look like a co-location space should live there.

The building is a 1900 century in not good condition place that you walk up very narrow dangerous stair to get to. Basically what it is, is a geek shop that someone gutted some apartments, put up lots of AC, power, racks, generate etc… to start up a co-location space.

This is a total non corporate geek place where you can get space and managed service for much cheaper than you are going to get at a Sunguard. They are very rough around the edges, but seemed to be quite knowledgeable, they are staff 24/7 and had some good bandwidth coming in.

Did have a fire suppression system. Seemed a little warm in their datacenter for my taste.

Visi (St. Paul)

We took a look at this enterprise class datacenter and I was really impressed. They seemed to have it all, they has more than enough air conditioning, they had a ton of space available and even more to expand later.

They had raised floors for their AC, they had plenty of power and redundant everything, Fire suppression, etc…. They provided everything from just a 1/4 of a rack to caged off areas for all your racks. They will give you any level of managed service you need up to a completely hosted solution.

Great security, clean place, friendly people. They have a 24/7 NOC on site that is always managing the datacenter. Everything was straight forward, didn’t push anything and we will to work with you.

I would rank this datacenter #1 out of all the datacenters we toured yesterday.

Implex (Minneapolis)

This datacenter is in the basement of a high-rise building in Minneapolis. They datacenter is located in a bank vault for extra security. This datacenter was rather disappointing to me, their datacenter was downright hot, most equipment was in open racks with cables running everywhere.

Didn’t seem like they had their act together at all, someone could trip and rip a cable out of your equipment or power something off accidently. They didn’t have a lot of room open but even if they did their AC wouldn’t have been able to handle it. Wasn’t really happy with any aspect of their co-locate space.

I would rank this datacenter as the worst one we toured yesterday.

ipHouse (Tritech Building, Minneapolis)

This datacenter is located in the Tritech building and was impressively large. This was by far the largest open facility that we toured but most of the space was open cages for growth.

As I said this was a large space and so hard to cool and they did appear to have some cooling issues. They didn’t have a raised floor and really just seemed too hot for me to be real comfortable.

They have good security, redundant power, generators , etc… There are a ton of ISPs/telecoms in this area for cross connecting your connection to different carriers would be no problem. The people running this datacenter were knowledgeable, friendly, and willing to work with different situations.

I think I would rank this datacenter as my #2 pick over the ones we saw yesterday.

I would imagine that they are going to be much cheaper than Visi my #1 pick so might be the best viable solution.

We haven’t gotten prices back from any of these places and that could change some of the standings but I think by taking a look at these datacenters we got a feel for how they are going to stack up price wise.

This by far isn’t all the details for these datacenter but the things that stuck in my mind. If you have any questions of comments about these datacenters post a comment.