Class#8 One-Wilshire, CRG West

The trip to One Wilshire provided excellent and unique insight into how the Internet works and how a major access point operates. Thanks to Mr. Sam Proudy for his excellent briefing and tour.

One 664,000 square-foot One Wilshire building was the first building to scrape the downtown LA Skyline in 1966. It became an alternative for the closed AT&T network shortly thereafter.

By touring Wilshire One we got to see first hand what a major global Internet Exchange (IX) looks like and get a sense of how it operates. We also got some rare insights into the operation of a major carrier hotel and data center.

The heart of CRG West’s One Wilshire is the Meet-Me room and its Any2 Exchange. This is the essence of the Internet. The Internet is, and was originally designed to be a network of networks. A priori, to achieve this, the networks must exchange data freely or “Peer”. Carrier neutral peering is what makes the Internet work. Seeing the Meet-Me room is a rare glimpse of Peering. Just beneath the visible, vast runs of copper and fiber interconnects, lay the switches and invisible software that manage an average of over 17 Gbps of traffic interconnecting about 120 users. This makes One Wilshire one of the busiest places on the global net.

Some of the interesting facts we learned on the tour:

• The limiting factors in data center operations are power and cooling. The data center is designed for about 150 Watts/Sq Ft. Paradoxically, smaller “blades” simply create much more density and more difficult cooling requirements. Therefore we saw some cages with a lot empty space since the max number of servers can fit in many fewer racks. This is also why Google and Microsoft are building super sized data centers where power is cheap.
• I was surprised to learn about the enormous price differences in power from 2 cents in Oregon where hydroelectric power is cheap, to 9 cents in LA to 13 cents in San Jose.
• Wilshire One sucks up a whopping 25 Megawatts per month. The City of Santa Monica uses about 15.
• Redundancy including failover power and cooling backup is essential. The blackout in Florida on Wednesday is a case in point. The 4 submarine trans-pacific fiber cables that were interrupted a couple of weeks highlighted some of the vulnerabilities and why CRG has separate facilities that back each other up.
• The US is one of the few places where major carriers from around the world can “peer” without government interference. That makes the One Wilshire Any2 Exchange extremely important in the global grid.
• CDNs or Content Delivery Networks such as Akamai and Limelight play an important role in optimizing data distribution.

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