Situated at 44790 Performance Circle at the heart of Data Center Alley in Ashburn, Virginia, the Equinix Washington DC IBX® Data Center opened in September of 2017.
With total cross connects numbering more than 37,000 across the Washington D.C. area, the data center is something of a template for deploying the company's Equinix Fabric services for purposes of directly, securely and dynamically connecting distributed infrastructure and digital ecosystems on its proprietary Platform Equinix.
Via the platform, customers can establish data center-to-data center network connections on-demand between any two Equinix Fabric locations within a metro or globally via software-defined interconnection.
DCF's primary tour guide for DC12 was Stefan Raab, Senior Director of Business Development - Americas, for Equinix. (Raab is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for this Fall's Data Center Frontier Trends Summit, our inaugural live conference event being held from Sept. 4-6.)
Raab notes that in Equinix data centers, which are always referred to as international business exchanges (IBXs), "The focus is really on the exchange part, helping our customers collaborate and work together. My colleagues use airport analogies or sometimes city analogies."
He adds, "It's not just a shell and some power and cooling to host equipment. It's really a place for businesses to digitally collaborate, helping our customers work together and to really create the value of being able to be in the same places as their customers."
Located on the internet pioneer's Ashburn Campus, DC12 offers customers access to one of the top three peering exchange markets, and the largest peering exchange in the U.S. east coast.
With N+1 electrical and cooling system redundancy, the data center's certifications include those for: HECVAT; HIPAA; ISO 22301; ISO 27001; NIST 800-53/FISMA High; PCI DSS; SOC 1 Type II; SOC 2 Type II and others.
On our tour, Rabb highlighted the data center's security measures and the unique value proposition of allowing customers to bring their own fiber directly to their equipment, as well as the use of in-mesh demarcation panels for external delivery of cross connects.
Raab also emphasized the importance of operational excellence and the reliability of the company's operations team in maintaining a high-quality product globally. Several members of the operations team accompanied us on the tour.
Classic Retail Colocation Provider
Raab noted how, as a classic retail colocation provider, Equinix offers customizable services to diverse customers; and indeed, as we toured DC12's data halls we saw a great variety of different cage sizes, cabling systems and cabinets for different customer requirements.
"In this building here, it's a very application-focused environment," said Raab. "I think one of the things that differentiates us as a retail instead of a wholesale provider is we do have lots of different customers. Obviously, we have parameters within which they have to operate, but our customers are bringing their own equipment. We provide services to help them, but by and large the customers get to choose what they're doing in their cages."
Explaining Equinix Ashburn footprint, Raab added, "We're in DC12 now. DC 15 is adjacent to us. The four story build you saw [outside] is a soon-to-open DC16, which is part of our north campus."
He went on, "Here in Ashburn, we also have the campus consisting of [data centers] 1,2,4,5,6 and eleven. That's really where it began for Equinix. Where in the early days they were looking for a neutral place to peer, to bring the Internet together, it wasn't owned by someone who was also in the Internet business. That's where our name comes from: equal, neutral Internet exchange."
History and Significance of Peering and Cross Connects in Ashburn
Continuing with the Equinix history lesson, Raab said, "The genesis of our name all started with DC1, DC2 -- really early, pivotal sites for the Internet -- becoming some of the largest peering [locations] in North America and some of the largest peering globally."
He explained further, "In the US, we tend to see a lot more private peering, which is just physical cross connects." Raab went on, "The amount of peering that goes on is enormous and not directly measurable anymore because it's all happening over private cross connects. So what we look at is total cross connects; and in Ashburn alone, it's now over 30,000 cross connects that we run between our customers on campus."
Raab concluded, "That's an important measure: the exchange part, doing business together. The cross connects become a proxy for that, how much business our customers do with each other in our buildings."
Characterizing how Ashburn has been central to the Internet's infrastructure and growth, Raab described how the area's Equinix data center footprint "set the stage for Ashburn being the gateway to the Internet, or as I like to call it, the beating heart of the Internet. Not measurable per se, but really that peering where everything comes together being central to the formation of the Internet and its former government DoD routes, and then also being proximate to provide for both the U.S. and Europe a fairly central home."
Consistency in Processes, Procedures Across All Equinix Sites
"Even in the sites we acquire, we do try and bring strong consistency," said Raab. "Things like the red tower. If you're ever lost in an Equinix data center, look for the red tower, that'll be your way out. From our methods of entry and a lot of our processes and procedures, we try and offer a solution for our customers that is globally consistent."
Raab said the modern, efficient retail data center design on display at the Equinix Ashburn campus is continuously evolving and improving. "I've been to a lot of data centers, and there is nothing that I've seen that compares to Ashburn in terms of scope and scale of builds," he said, adding, "You'll see a very modern, very efficient retail data center design here."
Raab runs the company's Americas business development team. As we set off on our tour, he said, "My team looks after the key ecosystems that we have within the business, and so I tend to be very focused on how our customers create value here. Our operations team are going to know the details of the facilities, what the builds are to really be able to answer in more detail those questions, so we'll try and play off each other here as we go through."
Rack Power Density Requests Scale with AI Applications; Liquid Cooling Capability In Place
Walking through DC12, Data Center Frontier asks about the data center's largest rack power density in the current market environment for AI.
The DC12 operations team representatives tell us they've had requests for 50 kW rack power densities and up, and that they're "doing a lot of work in the water-to-the-rack environment to help people get to those densities."
Discussion on the tour turns to anticipation of AI's impact on the data center industry. "We've got a cage in our facility next door where we test some of those innovations with partners and other customers," said Raab. "We're seeing a lot of those requests up into that neighborhood."
Gauging the scale of the AI technology disruption, Raab assessed further, "Cloud was definitely very disruptive to our industry, but cloud was technology primarily driven by technologists, whereas AI is being driven by everyone. I was telling the story of a cousin who got married and her Dad used ChatGPT to write his father of the bride speech. When you've got a technology that's being adopted that widely and the use cases are being driven from everywhere in the business and consumer world, that's a similar technology to what we saw with the introduction of the Web."
Raab said Equinix sees Generative AI's future evolving to drive the data center industry by centralizing its key elements.
"One of the things we really try and help our customers do is to provide that central point where data, people and applications can come together," he said. "AI either looks like people or it looks like an application, or it's working on data. We think that it's going to continue to follow that path and we certainly see the importance of interconnection and business collaboration around AI."
Other Retail-focused Colocation Benefits
Walking amid the traditional Equinix "blue lights," Raab noted that the Equinix Ashburn campus's office flex space as exemplified at DC12 is a service differentiator where customers "can patch directly from the office space into their equipment on the floor. That space allows them to run operations centers to run their businesses. We've seen lots of companies start from flex space and a cage on the floor and grow from there. So again, a very retail focused view in how we offer our products to our customers."
Our attention was further directed to corner "candy dish" shelving ensures all parts for cage and rack assembly are available in facilities. "This is sort of a retail focus," said Raab. "Nothing worse than showing up and being one rack nut short or one screw short. So all of our facilities have the candy dish, as we like to call it."
Raab went on to highlight the numerous security measures and processes in place at DC12, including its person trap with biometric points and strict access control. He went on to emphasize that one of the most unique aspects of the data center is in allowing direct customer fiber connections.
"One of the biggest things that we've done from the very early days is allow customers to bring their own fiber directly to their own equipment. From a manhole along the street, their fiber comes in, stays unbroken on a tray, and then gets dropped directly into their cage. That process is very unique in the data center industry [whereas] lot of our competitors will bring fiber into a central Meet Me room."
Fiber Access and Control
Raab elaborated on the value proposition of allowing customers to bring their own fiber directly to their equipment as a key service differentiator.
While noting that over 200 network service providers are represented on the Equinix Ashburn campus, in terms of the fiber connections at DC12, Raab reiterated how "anyone can bring fiber in and bring it to their cage, whether they're 100 cabinets or down to a much smaller presence."
"That really is one of the key differentiators because now, whether you're a network service provider who's bringing your own fiber in or a customer who's trenching their fiber and wants to own their own fiber, you can have access to that fiber. That unique value proposition that we offer, giving them control over how they manage it, really has been a differentiator for us."
Power and Cooling Distribution System Efficiencies
Standing in one of DC12's windowed passthroughs, the facility's operations team directs our attention to how outside, between DC12 and an adjacent data center building, sit the diesel generators.
The team notes how these feed inside to the facility's medium voltage infrastructure, including UPS and switch gear to the PDUs, which feed out to the RPPs [remote power panels] on the cages, an arrangement the operations team says "reduces copper - very efficient."
I'm told that unlike in older buildings, in DC12 "the cooling in this facility is super-efficient indirect evaporative cooling - way different than what we were putting in 20 years ago. The older buildings would typically use chilled water systems."
The importance of airflow management in the hot aisle containment facility is duly noted in the course of the tour.
In-mesh Demarcation Meets Varying Cage Design Requirements, Power and Security Needs
The Equinix DC12 team also highlighted the facility's use of in-mesh demarcation panels as a key feature, allowing for external delivery of cross-connects without technicians entering the cage, providing customers with more control over their setups.
The Equinix In-mesh Demarcation Rack is installed on the customer cage mesh to allow maximum usage of cage space. Raab explained that the in-mesh demarcation option ensures maximum security for the customer equipment within the cage, as well as accessibility for technical staff outside the customer’s cage.
As further noted on the company's website, "The type of demarcation point offered depends on the type of licensed space. In-cabinet demarcation is the standard solution for shared areas...post-demarcation, elevated demarcation, and in-mesh demarcation solutions are applicable for private cages and business suites independent of available space, number of cross connects ordered, and customer requirements."
Raab added, "You'll see different types of customers, whether it's more of a compute focus, or whether you've got a two-post telco rack for more of a network focus, or a more hybrid deployment. You'll see our standard cage design here and then a more enhanced cage. If a customer needs a full roof, they need the high walls, the reduced floor gaps. We'll work with customers even more strict in what they want for their cage design."
Raab added that the company ensures a variety of customer security needs. "We'll work with our customers to meet their security needs, both physical and virtual," he said. "That includes everything from entry, biometric access to cameras." He added, "Because it's retail, we're very strict about camera usage and where it can be focused and what kind of cameras can be deployed. We've got cameras deployed throughout, so we've got security footage for the whole campus."
Raab went on, "Some of our customers have either highly proprietary tech stacks or highly proprietary applications. They don't want their competitors or anyone else even to have visual understanding of what they've got deployed. We'll work with them to meet their needs and design the space to be their space in the facility. Obviously it has to work with the requirements that we have the building, but we generally have been able to find a solution for every customer that I've ever been involved with."
Meanwhile, DC12 ensures power redundancy during maintenance by segmenting circuits. Red circuits are primary, blue circuits are redundant. "We run the circuits overhead to the racks," explained Raab. "The customers have the ability to see which one they're plugging into their power strips, to make sure everything's segmented so if we're doing maintenance or something, we're not taking down both sides of the rack."
Discussing various customer cabinet configurations and deployments of the taller, shorter and vendor-specific varieties, Raab said, "You can see some deployments are still under construction or upgrading, moving in more equipment, or scaling up, doing technology refreshes."
Pets vs. Cattle
Nearing the end of our tour, Raab elaborated on the hoary concept of treating servers like "pets versus cattle" in modern cloud deployments, emphasizing scalability and redundancy.
"Cloud is often described as pets versus cattle. In the old days in the Internet world, we used to buy a server. We would give it a name. We would know it. It had an application dedicated to it. It was very specific. And if that server got sick, we healed it and brought it back."
"In the cloud world, the servers become treated like cattle. It's all about the yield of the herd. If one cattle is sick, they remove it from the herd to prevent it from infecting other cattle. And if they lose one or three, they don't care. They just move the workload to another one. It doesn't bring down an application. It doesn't affect a customer."
Interconnecting Buildings with Fiber using Equinix Fabric
Circling back around to how Equinix Ashburn's campus-wide connectivity solutions include dark fiber and other optical services, Raab noted:
"You can see that we treat our campuses as just that, a campus. So if a customer here in DC12 needs to connect to a customer in DC2, we can offer that connectivity for them. We have a variety of different products. If the fiber runs are short enough, we can do campus cross connects, which are just dark fiber cross connects. We have a product we call Metro Connect, which is a lit optical connection service as well. And then we have our Equinix Fabric, which is our Ethernet based interconnection product that allows customers to connect either within the building, within the campus, or across our global footprint."
Raab concluded, "Fabric has really become a growing platform for us. It's really important for our customers who need that cloud-like agility for their interconnection. We deliver cross connects quickly, in 24 to 48 hours in most cases. We'll run a physical fiber from one cage to another. But with Fabric, once you've got that Fabric port, you can provision it instantaneously. And customers can connect to each other; we don't stand in the way of that. So it really further enables our customers to do business with each other."
Matt Vincent
A B2B technology journalist and editor with more than two decades of experience, Matt Vincent is Editor in Chief of Data Center Frontier.
