NAP Of The Americas

I can only compare the Network Operations Center (NOC) of the NAP of the Americas to something you’d see in a 007 film whenever a government’s operations center is displayed: A big map of the world on a gigantic screen with interconnecting lines between New York, Miami, Los Angeles, London, Madrid, Tokyo, Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires, etc. and tens of desks with computer monitors displaying all sorts of statistics & monitoring information and tiny men & women wearing thick glasses staring at them.

The NAP of the Americas is terremark’s flagship Network Access Point (NAP) and one of the few of its kind to be carrier-neutral. NAPs are the backbones of the Internet, the fifth largest of its kind in the world and home to one of the 13 root servers in the world resolving around half a million requests per second at peak time. Here, you are only one hop away from the Internet on next generation Cisco equipment through 8 different Tier 1 carriers. The amount of data that goes through this building in a second is mind-boggling. Most of South America & the Caribbean is switched here. Akamai Technologies, Citrix, Yahoo!, Google, hospitals, universities, and most telecom carriers in South America are here. The most impressive though, aside from Citrix’s backup facility/cage, was CBS Sports’ server farm with something like 1200 servers in one cage.

The building has an area of three-quarters of a million square feet and they have the claim of being hurricane-proof in a region known where they are inevitable. Rated for 250 mph (Category 5 hurricane is 156 mph) winds, being on separate power grids, having it’s own water supply, power generators capable of carrying it off-the-grid conceivably over 30 days and being able to be flooded at ground level and continue to operate make this facility the perfect place for any mission critical information. It is no wonder that the government uses the top floor as well as the roof (3 satellite dishes) with top secret clearance requirements.

But on a simpler level, this is just a feat of engineering and testament of the capacity of entrepreneurship of our species.