Visa’s Secret Data Center
March 26th, 2012Via: USA Today:
Prisons are easier to enter than Visa’s top-secret Operations Center East, its biggest, newest and most advanced U.S. data center.
The 8-acre facility looks like any other industrial park in a sleepy suburb. But the serene setting masks hundreds of cameras and a crack team of former military personnel. Hydraulic bollards beneath the road leading to the OCE can be quickly raised to stop an intruding car going 50 mph. Any speed faster, and the car can’t navigate a hairpin turn, sending it into a drainage pond that functions as a modern-day moat.
The data center resembles a fortress, with dogged attention to detail. It can withstand earthquakes and hurricane-force winds of up to 170 mph. A 1.5-million-gallon storage tank cools the system. Diesel generators onsite have enough power, in the event of an outage, to keep the center running for nine days. They generate enough electricity for 25,000 households.
Once you get clearance from a guard station, get an OK from a roving security guy in a golf cart, and surrender a photo and fingerprint inside, the adventure begins.
There are plenty of reasons for the airtight security. Billions, in fact.
In an era when mobile purchases on smartphones and tablets are expected to grow 73% to $11.6 billion in the U.S. this year, security is a necessary obsession at OCE — and an acknowledgment of the perils posed by profit-minded hackers.
Mobile payments are just a trickle of the more than 200 million daily transactions processed here and at one other Visa data center in North America.
“We’re at the forefront of data centers,” says Rick Knight, head of global systems operations and engineering. “Now everyone has to do it.”
