Tucked away on West Lexington Street just a stone’s throw from Lexington Market is the data center of Edge Web Hosting, a seven-year-old managed hosting company for “mission critical infrastructure.”
Really, the people at Edge act more like an online army for companies that need websites up and running 24 hours every day with virtually no interruptions. Each day, on average, Edge employees deflect anywhere between 10 and 15 million attacks perpetrated by hackers on clients’ websites.
And those clients? It’s a variety: Fortune 100 companies, pharmaceutical companies, health insurance companies, the GOP and the Oxford English Dictionary. (That’s right. Next time you’re searching for the origins of the word mendacious, that OED site is coming to you courtesy of Edge. No lie.)
To handle the load, Edge’s data center has the equivalent of 40,000 T1, fiber-optic lines of Internet, as Technically Baltimore found out during the second gb.tc Tech Crawl on Monday night. The first took place before Tech Night in November 2012.
More from Edge:
- Edge employs a 2n design (which is fairly standard for data centers). Only 40 percent of the power keeping the data center going is in use at any time, which ensures that clients’ websites don’t go dark should anything catastrophic happen to Baltimore’s electrical grid.
- The Edge data center takes power — 13,000 volts’ worth — directly from the grid of Baltimore city.
- It’s one of two primary sites in Baltimore city through which the Northeast’s fiber lines run.
- Edge also has another data center in Ashburn, Va., and plans to open another data center in Phoenix, Ariz., later this year.
Also: Edge Web Hosting has the Internet. Note the orange tube in the photo below.
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