Web hosting provider 1&1 has turned a former warehouse in Lenexa, a Kansas suburb, into a state-of-the-art data center able to withstand Kansas's infamous tornadoes with its two sets of mason walls on all sides and a second steel reinforced roof with a concrete layer on top.

Aside from its renown for twisters, Kansas has also gained the nickname 'the Heart of America' partly because it is approximately in the center of the continental US. The railroads that once connected the nation are nowequipped with fiber-optic cables and as a major railroad hub, channeling data from coast to coast. It is therefore fitting that Germany-based 1&1 chose Kansas as the heart of its US operations as the location of its first data center in the US, powering its US operations headquartered in Philadelphia suburb Chesterbrook, Pennsylvania.

Powerful and Reliable

The 55,000 square foot data center is divided into five server rooms with combined capacity for 40,000 servers. The facility has unusually high, four-foot raised floors that give space to connect up to nine computer room air conditioning systems in each room.

Also, unlike many data centers that cool entire server rooms, many of Lenexa's servers are enclosed in see-through containers that look somewhat like china cabinets, so that only the air close to the servers is cooled and not the air in the entire data center room. Others are paired in aisles with a column of cooling air between the two rows, allowing efficient cooling without the cool air escaping to the room where it is unneeded.

Ziegler shows 1&1 CEO Oliver Mauss a row of servers cooled on the opposite side by a column of air conditioning.

"We have a very hard time optimizing because there is not a lot of room for improvement," explains Thorsten Ziegler, who has spearheaded the development of the Lenexa facility as head of 1&1's US data center division. Having operated four data centers prior to Lenexa, Ziegler says 1&1 has as the experience to cut inefficiencies and remain at the top of the industry as worlds' largest Web hosting provider by known servers.

Due to state power regulation, the Lenexa data center is unable to directly plug into renewable energy. To remain environmentally responsible, the company is offsetting all of its power usage by purchasing REC's from the Bonneville Environmental Foundation (www.b-e-f.org).

When the grid goes out, however, the Lenexa facility is rated to last six to seven days without external electricity. It has two 3,600 horse power diesel generators each generating 2,250 kW in case of a utility outage. The generators are tested once every four weeks when there is a simulated power outage.

"The only problem [with the generators] is that they are very loud," Ziegler says. "The neighbors are going to hate us." He explains that the generators have a lead time of 12 months, making obtaining them a major consideration in building a data center.

Building for the Future

While based in a place rich in history, the Lenexa data center is also built with room for future improvements.

It is equipped to use Internet Protocol version 6, which has a much larger address space than IPv4. It provides more flexibility in allocating addresses and routing traffic and virtually eliminates the need for network address translation to avoid address exhaustion. It also simplifies address assignment and renumbering when changing Internet connectivity providers.

"We are able to run IPv6 and we're actually running it," said Ziegler. While he notes that less than one-percent of clients use it as opposed to the IPv4 that the vast majority of the Internet runs on, it will one day be necessary for data centers to be equipped to run it.

Also, the data center's capacity of 40,000 servers has not been filled, allowing for improvements in servers as processors, motherboards and other components become more sophisticated.