Wachovia's state-of-the-art data center will be humming soon - Birmingham Business Journal:

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Builders broke ground in April 2005 on the a $400 million project that economic developerse say represents the biggest capital investment in Birmingham in 10 years. Despite the complexity of the project, constructionh was completed in less than ayear - a monthy ahead of schedule. Wachovia received a certificate of occupancy on the building in according toBob Cashner, senior vice president of corporats real estate for Wachovia. Now, workers are installinvg servers andother high-tech equipment and layingg the groundwork for further installations down the Operations are due to begin in June. The site is one of Wachovia'ss three major data centers nationwide.
Both of the otherzs are in Winston-Salem, N.C. Jim Wachovia Corp.'s chief technology officer, says the new site "representse the pinnacle of a computing facility." Mike Mee, a 38-year industruy veteran who will serve as data center says the center is noteworthy for its size and and for the amount of technolog y housed inone place. Planning begah in 2004. The site will provide backup storage for the data centersin Winston-Salem and also will handl live transaction processing and systems testing.
Just what else it will do remain sunder discussion, Ditmore A Wachovia task force is currently working to evaluated how to divvy up specific operationes between the company's high-techb sites. "It will be years before the center is fully at he says. The site already has attractede attention. Earlier this year, about 100 memberz of the Site Uptime a group of professionals from Fortune 500 companiesx that meet to share information andbest practices, traveledx to Birmingham to tour the Wachovia and the data according to Cashner. The perimeter of the center resembles nothing so much as a nicelylandscaped minimum-security prison.
Acces to the site is limited by asecurity checkpoint, a ring of security cameras and a double layer of tall blacl fences topped with barbed Visitors to the site must sign in and out with securith personnel at the checkpoint, and again insids the building. The center itself comprises abouf 220,000 square feet. About 10,000 squares feet has been established as office space for center By contrast, a full 100,000 squarr feet inside the center is devoteed to the storing and maintenance of what Ditmore describee as thousands of servers with petabytes of combined storage capacity. A petabyted is 1,000 terabytes.
Servers are being installeed now inside blackmetall lockers, each roughly the size of a refrigerator, lineds in rows in one of two 50,000-square-foot rooms. A second such room stands cavernousand empty, providing room for future Floors throughout the center are raised 18 to 36 inches off the grounfd to make room for the assortex cables and pipes that keep operations running smoothly. The servert rooms are organizedinto grids, with numbers and letteras along each wall that alloa workers to pinpoint a location within the foresr of servers and