August 31, 2001 - The raised floor area at the heart of IBM’s Toronto Web hosting facility, explains Steven Leo, the company’s offerings manager of managed Web hosting services in Canada, is built “like a building within a building.” It sits on a thick concrete slab, built with reinforced walls, the data center is an enormous protected enclosure, like a bank vault or a bomb shelter, nestled into the structure of an office building just like any other, in the suburbs north of the city.
In a Web hosting landscape where facilities are often set in remote locations, IBM’s is an anomaly. Set amid the corporate comings and goings of an ordinary office complex, the technology giant’s data center—operating since 1991, long before the company entered the Web hosting market—is as unusually positioned as its entry into the Web hosting marketplace.
“We didn’t have to buy our way into the marketplace,” says Paul Lovell, the IBM executive responsible for the company’s Canadian Web hosting business. “We’re leveraging the infrastructure that, as a company, we had already built in Canada.” Long before IBM ventured into the commercial Web hosting business, it had already established a sound infrastructure, put in place to provide same type of service to its major clients like the Bank of Nova Scotia and one of the world’s biggest IT customers, IBM itself. “The reason we did it this way,” says Lovell, “is that we looked at the alternatives, and we looked at the characteristics of the infrastructure we already had, and it is head and shoulders above anything else.”
And it is certainly an impressive facility, with perhaps its most striking feature being the area affectionately referred to by the IBM folks as “the bunker.” A vast expanse hidden 22 feet underground, behind several layers of security and a maze of hallways, the bunker houses the backup and monitoring equipment for the power to the hosting center’s raised floor area. The power for the facility is set up on a separate grid, and fed into the building through two distinct feeds, one above and one below ground. And the system monitoring the power supply is so exacting that it sometimes picks up disturbances before the power company does. In the event of a failure, the data center is equipped with a 30,000-liter diesel generator, enough to run the entire facility for 39 hours, located in a sunken enclosure separated from the main structure so it can be operated even if, for some reason, the building is inaccessible. IBM’s power system also includes UPS backup systems and 4 backup batteries, each consisting of 254 cells.
Although the hosting facility itself is located within an office tower, the security is as tight as any customer could hope for. IBM has its own security office at the entrance to the building, and access to the raised floor area is restricted by a number of locked doors and limited to only the essential operating personnel. Even Lovell can’t normally access the hosting space.
IBM’s hosting services are divided into sections. And if one were to draw a map of those services, it would probably resemble a map of the Toronto facility’s raised floor area, which is also divided into sections. The simpler side of the hosting services closely resembles what the industry traditionally calls colocation. IBM, however, calls its simpler services “customer accessible hosting.” “The customer can bring their server and their content into a facility like ours,” says Leo, “mount the server, and then take advantage of the data center itself and the bandwidth solution.” The service is as simple and straightforward as the customer accessible area of the facility. A staging area, in which customers can set up and configure their equipment, includes a secure area for the storage of equipment that has been shipped to the center, and is connected to the hosting space. In the colocation area, rows of tall, black cabinets house clients’ servers, and can only be opened with configurable electronic keys carried by the customers.
Beyond the facilities-based hosting service, IBM offers what it calls a shared responsibility service, in which customers can outsource the operation of their equipment bit-by-bit, adding from IBM’s suite of managed services one piece at a time. “The customer has the ability to buy services that will take you from where you’re responsible for everything,” says Leo, “to where you share responsibility between IBM and yourself.”
Those managed elements are pieces of the service that IBM calls “fully managed.” “Here,” says Leo, “is where we do everything for you except the application. And in fact, if you want us to do the application we could do that for you too.” IBM’s fully managed customers reside in a more secure area of the raised floor, but one less hindered by the need for individual cabinets and personalized security. Here, IBM houses its fully outsourced clientele offering high end systems management, problem and change management, customer management and bandwidth management. “We look at this as a solution to a business problem,” says Leo. “You talk to us about your business problem, and we build a solution to address that problem.”
And Lovell feels that IBM is uniquely qualified to address the issues of e-business management. More so than even the telecommunications companies entering the hosting market. “It really is a difference in philosophy,” says Lovell. “Network-centric companies approach the marketplace to sell bandwidth. That’s why they continue to look for solutions that will fill up the pipes. We, as a company, have a more operational or server-centric background. That’s our legacy as IBM, and frankly, that’s not something we’ve built and are trying to bring to the market in the last two years. We’re taking 30 years of experience in processes and disciplines and leveraging that learning into something that is a relatively new technology.” IBM’s philosophy, says Lovell, is one of operational excellence rather than network optimization.
Focusing on the operations allows IBM to do some outsourcing of its own. And in response, it has partnered with Bell and AT&T, buying its bandwidth from two of the leaders in the telecommunications market. “Because those are two deep organizations in terms of skills, capabilities, bandwidth, tools and processes,” says Lovell, “in order to provide a robust network-based solution that links in tightly with our server-focused solution. So you get the best of both worlds.”
Walking out of the raised floor area, Lovell explains how he ends the tour for potential customers. “I open the door to the service floor, and I tell them they get all those people working on their hosting solution.” In addition to the top-notch facility, the company is selling a know-how built from years atop the hardware and software businesses.
