THIS Is Where the Internet Lives

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: What if I told you the world's biggest companies don't use the internet like you and I do? They have a direct connection to each other. They're neighbors, bypassing the big bad wild internet. And they do that here. This is where the internet lives. This is the Dallas Info Mart. 1.5 million square feet of data center goodness. 8,700 strands of fiber, multiple internet exchanges, over 140 networks peering at terabit speeds. It's one of the most connected buildings on earth. In fact, if you're watching this video from here, your packets are likely going through this building right now. So let's try and get in there, get your coffee ready. We're going to go play inside a data center today. It's going to be kind of crazy. Look at all these timestamps and covered a lot. Let's go. Yeah. I go into the info Mars. Now getting inside a data center is hard. Security is intense. They got multiple layers of protection and it makes sense. I mean, they're protecting billions of dollars worth of equipment and a large chunk of the internet. You can't even get past reception without a being a customer or B being invited. Thankfully, we didn't have to social engineer our way in there, putting on a hard hat and a vest and pretending we're important. Although I'd like to try that one day actually ethically, of course, but today we're invited or I use my YouTube powers to ethically hack with my influence. Go with that. It sounds way cooler, but seriously, Equinix invited us out and made this video possible. Thank you, Equinix. So this is actually one of their data centers. [00:01:14] Sal Gonzalez: And this is one of their people, Sal. Hi, I'm Sal Gonzalez, senior manager of global technical sales. Been with Equinix 24 years here in Dallas, Texas. [00:01:23] Speaker 1: I tricked Sal into letting us follow him into the data center. Now, after me and my team signed in at the first checkpoint, supplying our ID is getting a fancy name tag. We then encountered the man trap. Not just anyone can go into a data center. You have to have access key card, thumbprint, and go into a man trap or person trap. This is the fanciest one I've ever seen. Come on in. It's a trap because once you arrive inside, both doors have to be closed before the other one opens. Then you have to authenticate on this side, too, to open the door. And now we can get to the data center. Now, this prevents a very popular form of physical security hacking known as tailgating or just following someone in, grabbing the door before it fully closes, which is kind of what I did following Sal in, but he let me. But normally that does curtail this quite a bit. And it's hard to stay under the radar when you're awkwardly standing next to someone waiting for them to open the second door. It becomes a bit obvious what you're doing. This man trap, like most you'll encounter, is a security measure ensuring only authorized individuals enter secure areas. Now, once in, we're being watched at all times, not just cameras, but we had to be escorted everywhere we went. I couldn't even go to the bathroom without Sal. I also couldn't get coffee without Sal. So I begged for coffee and he took me to the break room, which is actually kind of fancy. They had fancy seltzer water. Coffee was just okay. I should probably help them with that. Why don't I sell my coffee to data centers? I'm going to write that idea down, actually. Now, at this point, we're still not in the data center. I don't hear that sweet, sweet sound of whirring server. But we're about to be. But first, we encountered yet another door that required another badge and fingerprint. This place is secure. But why the extra door? We already authenticated, right? Yes, but there's layers. You see, as a customer at that data center, you are only given access to your stuff. The floor your stuff is on and the cage your stuff lives in. Yes, there's another area that requires another badge and another fingerprint. It's insane. But then we saw this. As we were walking through those doors, I saw a customer wheeling in a massive rack of servers. [00:03:11] Sal Gonzalez: And here's an example of the customer that is bringing in a 40-loader rack. [00:03:16] Speaker 1: That's an AI customer, isn't it? Do you recognize that customer? It's Grok or Grok. I'm not sure how to say it. They are an AI company and those racks were dripping with LPUs. Oh, I was kind of freaking out. I couldn't stop smiling. And we actually had to ask permission to even mention that we saw them. And that's what's so cool about being in this data center. Major companies, companies that we rely on for core services, they're here. This is where they put their stuff. This is the internet. When we're asking AI a question, it's answering it right there. When we like a video on YouTube, actually go ahead and try it. Hit the like button. Watch. You're gonna make that server smile. Ready? See, there it went. This is the internet. I need to calm down. A little coffee break. Now getting back to security. I looked at a lot of server racks as we walked by, because I'm always curious what people have. But what I didn't see was any indication of what company these servers belong to. And that's by design. Just walking past these racks, if you happen to notice a company you're familiar with and seeing what servers and networking hardware they use, those are some trade secrets. And then Equinix takes it a step further. Notice the lights in this place. They're blue. Why is almost every light in the Equinix data center blue? It makes it colder in here. No, that's not true. There's two reasons they have that. One, it's just fun. RGB, we do it to our gaming machines and they do it to data centers too. The field was supposed to be kind of a nightclub. You got black walls, blue lights, video games in the conference rooms. The second reason is that it's kind of secure, or at least it used to be. Having blue lights made it harder to read the labels of the people's equipment in the cages. If you happen to know that a customer used F5 and you're a competitor, hey, I might want to use F5. They're using Cisco. I want to use Cisco. I want to have a competitive edge. And I kind of like that. Just another subtle form of security. And if you're new to security, stuff like this is key. Multiple layers, defense and depth. Don't rely on one solution, one method to secure your stuff. Use multiple layers. Now, one thing I want to point out that company grok, which by the way is not X AI grok. It's this grok. They're wheeling in racks of servers back in my day. When I was a network and systems engineer, we would be assigned a rack in a data center. And we'd have to bring all of our stuff with us to that rack and then rack it and stack it ourselves. I still have scars from the cage nuts. Look, but when you're working with Equinix, it's common to have all your stuff pre-configured and they do the rest. Now look at these cages. This is something I wasn't used to. When I would walk into a data center, I would just see rows and rows of server cabinets that I could just walk up to and open most of them anyway. Not great for security. I like what Equinix does here better. When a customer puts their stuff into a cage, usually only that customer has access to this cage. Fingerprint badge. Unless you have that, you're not getting in there. And look at these cages. Not all of them are the same. And I thought this was so interesting because some have an open top. So in theory, I could climb that cage and get in there. Tom Cruise style. I asked him if I could do that or if anyone would catch me, if they weren't looking, they're like, no, we're always looking. And we would catch you within five seconds. [00:06:01] Speaker 3: Securities watch it. So if you want to get tackled by someone. [00:06:05] Speaker 1: Noted. But other cages, they actually have a closed top and some I couldn't even see. They were in enclosed areas. [00:06:11] Sal Gonzalez: Some customers are also not additionally just to the deck there. They actually put the mesh underneath that as well. And it's fully enclosed. [00:06:18] Speaker 1: Top secret. I wasn't allowed in there. Still bummed about that. I would imagine there are some crazy top secret companies in this. Data center. There's gotta be, and it's kind of cool. If you need top secret stuff, Equinix will give you what you need. Customers can also put whatever security they want. And unless there's some kind of crazy security issue, Equinix will not even go into your cage. [00:06:35] Speaker 3: This is your cage. Here I'll flatten here. It's gonna deny me because I am not the customer of this cage. [00:06:41] Speaker 1: Now, speaking of security, what about the people? Like the people who work there? I actually learned that becoming an Equinix technician is no joke. This is Manny. He started as a tech over 20 years ago. [00:06:51] Speaker 4: I've been with Equinix 24 years going on 25 years in July. I'm a sales engineer started as a tech for eight years here at the data center. Day one, uh, side engineer. I was on South team, um, sales engineer for eight years. So that's the combined 24 years. [00:07:06] Speaker 1: And this is part of their interview process. They took me to this other building and they had this rack where you had to actually go through a test building cables, running fiber, splicing cool. [00:07:15] Speaker 4: Cause a lot of people in the interview can talk. I got my CCNA. I brought problems is up to date. Yeah. Yeah. And then it's like, they get, you know, I fall. Yeah. I can even do an RJ 45. So what I'll do is break the fiber, unplug it somewhere and break that, [00:07:29] Speaker 1: that circuit. Now something had me wondering, I saw all these grok racks being wheeled in. You gotta know they're just dripping and how in the world do they power all this and how do they cool it? Because I don't even keep my gaming machine here in my studio. I used to get way too hot. So I keep it in a cool server room. Imagine an entire rack of GPUs and not just a rack, a data center full of GPUs. And then I saw this, look at the floors. Yeah. Go ahead and look. Do you notice something weird? They're not raised floors in a typical data center. You have a raised floor and they actually pump cool air in from the ground because you know, hot air rises. This place didn't have that. How are they, how are they cooling this stuff? [00:08:06] Sal Gonzalez: This facility we've evolved to pushing air from the side. [00:08:10] Speaker 1: And the hot air is actually pushed up and out through ventilation. So typical hot air rising situation. [00:08:15] Sal Gonzalez: This is the air handler pushing it to the side, goes up to the top. It still comes back, but now it's being flooded. The room being fed to the site. [00:08:22] Speaker 1: Now I sell, which is better the raised floor or the way they do it. Pushing air from the side. [00:08:26] Sal Gonzalez: We can argue to word as blue of those life. It's just a preference when it's all set and done they use slab floors because [00:08:33] Speaker 1: it can hold more weight. Those server racks are heavy. Now on every floor, they have air handlers at the end of the hall that cool everything, but the power of this is on the roof. And the way they call this data center is kind of like a gaming computer. Hear me out. It's like liquid cooling on the top. You have your radiator, like your gaming PC. You normally mount your radiator and the fans to the top. You'll have your water or your liquid, go to your radiator, get cooled off by the fans, and they get pushed back down to your GPU or your CPU to cool it off. And as the water gets hot, it goes back up and gets cooled off again. That's what's happening here. All these things are doing that. And what's crazy is that each one of these containers is self-contained, meaning when they want to add another one, they just airlift it in there. Boom. All one go. They also have giant water tanks. That's kind of a buffer in case something fails. I got some backup water to go in and cool things off. But what if the power fails? They got to back up for that. Their generator yard is insane, right? [00:09:20] Sal Gonzalez: We're able to run on diesel generators for a total of 36 hours at full load. What? Yeah. Everything here, 36 hours. Yes. Wow. And if for some reason we're not at full load and obviously we have more runtime. [00:09:35] Speaker 1: Back on the roof. It was kind of funny. Ed. Hi, Ed. He was very afraid of Heights, but he went up there for us. Didn't get anywhere near the edge, but I'm proud of that. Now enough about power and cooling and all that. Like that's fun. And you can go watch this guy. Cause he talked about it more, but I want to talk about bypassing the internet. Let's go there right now. Get your coffee ready. I'm already kind of hyped up today. Now this part is actually kind of crazy and it has everything to do with that dystopian mall across the street. You'll see. But first, I want to talk about the problem, this data center and it's dystopian mall or solving most people and businesses connect to AWS, GCP, Azure for stuff, the stuff we use on the internet. Cause that's where the internet lives. And it's critical especially for businesses because they'll often host their infrastructure up there in the cloud, but they also might have some stuff back in their data center and doing a hybrid cloud situation. So that connection dude, it can't be crappy, but often it kind of is we're usually connecting through the big, bad, wild internet, hopping between routers connections with potentially bad latency and frequent drops. It's kind of like going on a road trip. You can't guarantee the quality of the roads. You don't control any of that. And you never know when there's going to be traffic. That's the internet. That's why things are slow. Sometimes the equinix, they flip the script on this. They help people skip the internet and it's because they're so well-connected. Remember, this is the most well-connected building on earth. And we're talking about two buildings, not just one. The main data center is known as DA 11. It's flashy. It's fresh. It's ready to host all your crazy AI workloads across the street is something a bit older. This is the info Mart, the most interconnected data center in the Southwest. Let's go. It's DA one known as the info Mart. It's kind of pretty though. Got that retro futuristic feel. It's kind of my vibe. It was built in the 1980s and it was modeled after the London crystal palace. And it was supposed to be something like Tony Stark would think of a technology mall where companies like IBM and Kodak would have storefronts, permanent showrooms to show off their cool stuff, but it was kind of ahead of its time and it didn't take off. So now we're left with this big, large gorgeous building that happens to be sitting right on the middle of the internet super highway. [00:11:22] Sal Gonzalez: This is one of the most critical items and pieces of the building itself is just the amount of networked fibers that come in here and dark fibers that come in here. All right. This is ultimately what makes that one extra one next, which is a network connection hub for the world. [00:11:34] Speaker 1: Like I'm not even kidding. Location, location, location. This thing is sitting pretty. It literally is a fiber highway because in the U S long haul fiber cable was often laid along existing rights of way, primarily railway lines and existing highways. The info Mart is sitting right there at a major convergence of some fiber optic highways, grand central station for the internet. But this actually kind of became a problem. These major connection points, these internet exchange points were often controlled by a single large telecom company. And they called all the shots dictating who could connect and at what price the Equinix, they weren't about that. They actually pioneered the idea of a carrier neutral data center. And they said, Hey, anyone can come in level playing field. We don't care who you are. So it kind of works like this. Let's say AT&T wants to connect at the info Mart. They put a network note in there. It makes total sense. It's prime real estate. AT&T has all the connections, but you know what Verizon wants in too, and they can't they jump in and they connect and they lumen once in because they realize how valuable this real estate is. So now they all have network nodes there and it kind of snowballed from there. The more networks that joined, the more valuable this building became becoming one of the most network dense buildings on the planet. And that sentence just felt good to say coffee break. Okay. What does it have to do with our story though? Well, Equinix bought that building like it's ours now. And we're gonna let everyone come in. This happened back in 2018. And then they have another building right next door. Then they ran a massive fiber highway underneath between the two buildings. So if you wanna connect to a network or a cloud, it can all happen right here. It's just a cross connect away. Okay, cool. Lots of connections, but that's not all that Equinix is doing here to see the next part. We needed secret access to one of Equinix's own cages. Now I said a word before that you may not caught cross connect. What is that? It's a common thing you'll do in a data center. So let's say you and I, we start a company network, Chuck.Coffee, of course, and we put our servers in a data center, but then we're like, Hey, we want an internet connection. And let's say we go with AT&T, AT&T will have their network stuff, their telecom infrastructure in another cage, somewhere in that data center. We have to somehow get a connection to their stuff. So we have internet. So we'll order one. We'll order a physical cable that will connect our stuff, our router, our switch, whatever it is to AT&T is cage. That cable is called a cross connect. And you normally have to do this for whatever thing you wanna connect to. So maybe AWS, you wanna have a direct connection to AWS. You can do that because Equinix has everybody in there. You can order a cross connect, get a cable, go straight to AWS, Azure, GCP, whatever you want. But these are expensive and they take time. You have to order these months in advance. Time is money. But now back to our cage right here is housing. Something that I thought was the coolest idea ever. It's called fabric. Instead of getting a million cross connects to all the companies you gotta connect to, you just give one connection. [00:13:57] Speaker 5: This is Equinix fabric. This is something we designed over 10 years ago. We were founded with a internet exchange or I X. That's how we got started where people would literally do cross connect. So it was a one-to-one connection where they connect from one customer over to another customer and then we'd have everyone together like in a data center. So they'd be in close proximity. So we developed fabric in a way. So now you can just get that one port and you can create multiple virtual connections. So now you can have all your cloud connections. You can connect to other service providers with us, other network service providers, uh, other people like zoom, et cetera. They're on our fabric over 3000 other customers today, and you can connect to them within seconds. Now you don't have to go and talk to someone else to get a cable connected over to can just go connect to them virtually. And you can go anywhere from 10 megabits up to 50 gigabits. [00:14:51] Speaker 1: It already sounds cool. Let me hit it home real quick. Imagine you order a 10 gig connection from Equinix fabric. You can virtually segment that connection. However you want. Let's say you want one gig to AWS straight to their cage. How about one gig to Azure one gig to GCP let's use two gigs for AT and T internet, maybe one gig for Verizon for backup. This is all happening in a portal. You're just clicking. You're not running cable. How cool is that? Now the way fabric does this is with something called software defined networking, a fancy buzzword. That means you can do a lot of what we used to do physically inside software, making it super easy for us now. So in this rack is where all that's happening. You notice a lot of Juniper equipment. I'm a massive fan of Juniper. Now I don't want to oversimplify it, but it's kind of like connecting to a switch along with every other company. There you get a super fast, low latency connection with security obviously, but just sit back and think about that for a second with the racks of equipment you see here. Equinix is giving you access to all the major companies and cloud providers. And it's not just the companies connected to the hauntingly retro building across the street. Info mark major players also run fiber directly from the street, from manhole dark fiber into DA 11 and major companies might have a presence on multiple floors. This is one of those rooms where dark fiber comes in. Look at all that fiber. They were kind of hesitant to let us in there, [00:15:59] Sal Gonzalez: but they did me a solid. Let me just check. I think I have access. Let's see. [00:16:04] Speaker 1: Look at that. And that's the theme here. Connection, connection, connection. Like most data centers, they have one room in the data center called a meet me room where all the network providers come in and they're all just sitting there in a closet, hollowed together saying connect over here. Equinix doesn't play like that. Like every floor is a meet me room. Now, hold on. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking about fabric and how sure they give us a direct connection to AWS, GCP or Azure right there in that data center. What if you're trying to access AWS from another location, like AWS and GCP. And all these guys have multiple locations in other data centers. What if your stuff lives in Virginia or Washington or New York or California, then aren't you having to go across the internet anyway? Actually, no, you're on equinix is stuff. Now equinix has data centers, stinking everywhere. Look at all this. Look at all these data centers. Look at this map. So when you hop onto their network, you're on their network, the equinix internet, you're taking that special HOV lane VIPs only. Now me and my team spent all day at this data center, two incredible buildings. And we learned like how they work, what makes them tick, but you know what? It's not the security or the power or even the insane amount of connections that stuck with me. What makes this data center run is the people, these people that were walking us around, they were humble and awesome. They've also been there forever. Some of them for over 20 years. That tells you a lot about a company, by the way, if you want to know if a company is good, look at the tenure of their employees. So while it was cool walking around and seeing all the amazing things and geeking out, what was probably more fun was just getting to know these people, the people that make the internet run, because when you get down to it, all the tech we encounter, all the things we do, there's people behind it. And normally how awesome a product is correlates how much passion the people pour into it. So when you're surfing the internet today, when you ask AI a certain question, just pause for a moment. Think about Sal. So thank you, Sal, for making this possible. Manny, Brad, Ed, also say, thanks to Ed and Jordan. Like right now, they were the ones who organized this whole thing and they waited forever for me to make this video. And we're so patient. So if you could just like right now in the comments, say, thanks, Ed and Jordan. It might convince them to show us something crazier for the next video. Anyways, that's all I got. I'll catch you guys next time.