BB profiles Equinix, the $22.2 billion company that’s quietly grown into the world’s largest owner of interconnected data centers for finance. The scale and redundancy of its data centre 6 miles from the NYSE is mind bogglingly immense! Equinix however only provides “dark fiber” and doesn’t move data itself. That’s created opportunities for other companies. like the startup Lucera a kind of Radianz 2.0
They’re big on backups. In case of a power failure, NY4’s uninterrupted power supply room has 5,600 batteries on standby to provide eight minutes of electricity while the generators rev to life. Should the air conditioning fail and risk the servers overheating, there are three 150,000-gallon tanks filled with water chilled to 45F. Running that cold water through pipes would give NY4 staff 20 minutes to get the AC fixed. Oh, and the generators: 18 of them, each the size of a locomotive engine and able to crank out 2.5 megawatts of power. Equinix keeps 180,000 gallons of diesel fuel on-site to run them. In terms of footprint, NY4 is roughly the same size as a Manhattan block. If you want to look out the window, too bad. There isn’t one