HR Geek: (Product) Strategy for the Rest of Us

On Monday of this week I officially took over support for Sun's Network.com organization (Sun's technologies and services in grid, utility, and cloud computing).  For the inner geek in me, it's been fun already.

One of the discussions I've been following is a critique of different Network Access Point (NAP) providers, their designs, their efficiency, their security, their capacity, and other arcana way above my head.  The point of the discussion is to compare against Sun internal designs and look at who potential partners (or customers) might be, but for me, it's fun just to see how some of these things are built. 

One of the ones that caught my eye is the NAP of the Americas, located in Miami.  Here are a few of the technical specs:

• Design to withstand a category 5 hurricane with 19 million pounds of concrete ballast
  


• Equipment floors 32 feet above sea level (to avoid any storm surges from hurricanes)


• Roof designed to shed 100-year storm intensity rains


• 7" thick steel-reinforced concrete exterior walls

They seem pretty serious about having this thing still standing and running during even the nastiest of weather. 

Given it's role switching the majority of the network traffic for Latin America and Caribbean (148 countries connected in all), that makes a lot of sense.