The architecture could be straight out of a James Bond movie: an office building with crooked
hallways, where unannounced visitors would quickly lose their orientation. Behind this office stand two mirror-image structures. Their bottom floors disappear down into an earthen mound. The entrances are protected by steel fences.
Let there be no doubt: when it comes to security, the workers at IBMs Computer Centre in Ehningen, Germany, take things seriously. The basements 10,000 square metres house information that has no real home: data from the World Wide Web.
Web hosting is the technical name for this business. It’s also known as a Universal Server Farm, a vaguely agricultural term that seems to befit this plantation of powerful computers – servers, in technology speak – that sit on rows of shelving.
Ehningen is only one of IBM’s 15 computing centres worldwide, each of which is specially laid out for Web hosting. Customers from France’s Atlantic coast all the way to Vladivostok, Russia – including Switzerland’s Feldschloesschen Brewery and the online lender ELoan – rest assured knowing that the infrastructure of their Internet presence and of their digital
marketplaces are secure.
The external security precautions stem from a time when companies would store servers there that were expected to have little contact with the outside world. Today, danger often comes from the Net itself, as with the I Love You virus, which early last year caused world-wide
damages estimated to be billions of dollars.
The I Love You virus was here too, but it couldn’t get in, rejoices Ruediger Albrecht. The 48-year-old industrial engineer and telecommunications specialist is responsible for the business of running the server farm.
So-called firewalls are in place to protect against invisible attacks. These programs monitor data traffic so that no unauthorized access is allowed to the customer’s data.
These days, the web-hosting business is booming: since its inception two years ago, the staff at Ehningen has grown from four employees to 100. The stream of data on the Internet will be a thousand times greater by 2003, IBM estimates, and more and more companies are storing their data in servers at web hosting businesses.
Indeed, servers of every size and colour hum away on the ground floor of the Ehningen facility. Yet this chaos of the crawling stage of the Internet will soon be finished. At that point, smaller
computers will be added on to the larger, air-cooled servers in the cellar of the computing centre.
As with server farms elsewhere in the world, AlbrechtÕs workers are organized into three shifts that work around the clock.
In the Internet Age, 24-hour access to web sites can be crucial. Disruptions of service can mean the loss of real money for customers who run an online shop.
The customers blow their tops when the servers go down, Albrecht says. The native Berliner works hard to avoid that situation. I hate stress, he says. Nevertheless, he was recently awakened by a colleague who had a problem with a crashed server.
“We had the ignition key in the wrong way round.”
Such hands on work is fairly rare, though, most problems are fixed remotely using special software. For this reason the lights in IBM’s enormous basements rarely get switched on. If an emergency were to arise amid the local staff, the computing centre could also be serviced from facilities in England or Hungary.
In a world where 1 million websites are created every day, these underground “server farms” are becoming the last stand in keeping our information
safe – even if we cannot.
