2001

AOL Datacenters

What is now ubiquitous, the Internet is accessed by people in many different ways, from their home computers, phones, cars and all sorts of other devices, even refrigerators. What many people don’t realize or think about is the computers behind it all, the computers that run all those websites on the internet, many millions of computers.  Those computers have to be physically located somewhere and that is usually in what is known as a datacenter. A datacenter provides several things, physical space, network connectivity to the Internet, power, and air conditioning.  A datacenter can be nothing more than an air-conditioned room with an internet connection but typically are special rooms with increased power, air-conditioning, and internet connectivity.  The number of computers needed for a website is directly proportional to how many simultaneous users the site can support, with larger sites needing dozens if not hundreds of computers.  AOL, with its 30 million users, had thousands of computers.  I remember the first time I went into one of the AOL datacenters. One room was 15,000 square feet, larger than three basketball courts, and there were six such rooms in the datacenter.  I walked into the room seeing row after row of seven-foot-tall computer racks filled with computers. Over thirty rows, each 60 feet long, over a thousand computers, and that was just one room. There were six other rooms of the same size in that datacenter alone.  At the time, most AOL users used phone dialup service which required a modem for each connection. I never did see it, but I was told there were datacenter rooms filled with tens of thousands of modems. 

At the time I started working at AOL, AOL had several datacenters which AOL they called “technology centers”.  There was the Reston Technical Center (RTC) located a mile or so from where I lived. Located in Columbus Ohio was the original CompuServe Technical Center (CTC) which became part of AOL when AOL bought CompuServe in 1997. The Netscape Technical Center (NTC) was located in Mountain View California, which became part of AOL when AOL bought Netscape in 1999. The Dulles Technical Center was located on the AOL main campus in Dulles Virginia. The Manassas Technical Center was their newest datacenter located in Manassas Virginia. A few months after I started, AOL announced it was building a third datacenter, Gainesville Virginia.  

The thought was that with all the datacenter space that AOL (now AOL Time Warner) had available, the Time Warner divisions should not pay for computer hosting services at other companies when they could use the AOL datacenters for “free” and thus have a considerable cost savings.  I would become quite familiar with datacenters in the following years.

Yoga.