Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq:EQIX), the leading provider of network-neutral data centers and Internet exchange services, today announced that eHarmony will expand the company’s operations at Equinix with a new Web site operations deployment at Equinix’s Washington, D.C. area Internet Business Exchange™ (IBX®) center. The move comes after eHarmony has successfully deployed production operations for the company’s Web operations at Equinix’s Los Angeles area IBX center.
Starting in 2000, part of my duties at a management consulting firm was to track the location, bandwidth and occupants of Internet data centers around the world. The data we collected went into enormous maps printed on Darth Plotter. We used the data for a variety of projects, from planning optimized routes for fiber optic cables as the snake through cities such as Las Vegas, then the fastest growing metropolitan area in the US, to gauge the growth of internet companies based on the amount of rackspace and bandwidth ordered.
In addition to network connectivity benefits, Equinix’s centers also provide eHarmony with a secure and redundant physical infrastructure with a strong track record of uptime. Power operations at each center include a high-performance backup system that ensures uninterrupted power even in the event of utility power disruption. Security features include interlocking “mantrap” doors, multiple layers of biometric hand-geometry scanners controlling access, as well as 24-hour security officers and hundreds of surveillance cameras.
Eharmony states they currently have 13 million users.
This is the kind of critical infrastructure Markus at PlentyOfFish fame would categorize as over-redundancy. We’ll see how PoF itself adapts to it’s continued massive growth.