Never Above, Never Again

When your company’s data is critical, locating your servers and infrastructure in a collocation facility can limit liability, give you the uptime guarantee you need, and provide added value for your business. They are scattered around the country all pushing many of the same “vale adds” for your business. However, a few of them have a slight differentiator like being located in a former underground manmade cavern.

This past week I visited eCavern (http://www.ecavern.com). A collocation facility located in the city limits of Louisville Kentucky. This is unique in that the facility is both underground, and centrally located within a major metropolitan area. Louisville is a great location for collocation and hosting facilities. The city is home to several of them. Before last week, I would also say this is a relatively stable geological area until we felt an earthquake that occurred in St. Louis (http://folkworm.ceri.memphis.edu/recenteqs). This aside, the facility was met without harm.

The tour was pretty remarkable. We drove down a ramp into the former entrance of the mining facility (under a K-mart of all things) and were met by security guards who had us sign in and park our vehicle. We were them allowed entrance into the facility only after visual recognition of one of the Principles in the company. What was on the other side I was not prepared for; an office build out with more money per square foot than many office spaces I have seen.

The tour of the server facility was rather brief due to its only recent launch. They have a small client list and were very careful not to mention any names. The more entertaining part of the tour for me occurred when we piled into an electric powered industrial golf cart and drove some of the partially occupied three million square foot chamber.

Since I am not endorsing the product per say, I will not include any pricing information but I am sure it can all be found on the website. We met with the President of the company, Mark. He has a great video that can be found on the site explaining the entire product.

If you are a small business owner, and you house your own data, you are asking for problems with your clients. Find a collocation facility close to your IT personnel, and allow someone else to
manage your uptime guarantee.