Post by @mvilain@sfba.social

2026-10-24 04:01 UTC

@internetarchive@mastodon.archive.org Some years later after Genie moved out of their datacenter in Mountain View, Cisco bought the building for like $3M. They got a bargain because there were three literal house-sized diesel generators and fuel tanks to run them 24x7. By the time I was given the tour of the site which became the local WebEx datacenter, it was 98% all Cisco equipment with their servers, routers, power distribution, and wiring. The only non-Cisco equipment were very large Network Appliance boxes to provide storage to all the machines. I'd been in IT for over 20 years and this was the first time I'd been in a data center of that size and scope. I can only imagine what Google's custom-built multi-story racks and servers are like. Previously I'd worked in Oracle's Cloud storage unit which spanned datacenters and installations around the globe. That was the largest install I ever worked on. Upgrades were fun, for varyingly challenging values of fun.

Replies (1)

@teajaygrey@snac.bsd.cafe 2026-10-28 22:53

There were occasional real estate "deals" to be had I guess? I was previously a Network Security Specialist for Granite Rock Company; their current headquarters' building in Watsonville? Was previously some dot bomb era failure that was built out to be a fab. Supposedly construction costs were in excess of $100 million, Granite Rock Company purchased it for maybe 1/10th the price, if that? It had: building-wide UPS (there was an entire room full of batteries), a 700KW diesel generator (that would kick on within 1 minute of a power blip, and would also self test weekly), and it was also adjacent to a hospital (on power grids, hospitals are the last the have power reduced and the first to have power restored in the event of an outage). I've had employers with data center presence with less reliable power than that HQ building of Granite Rock Company's in Watsonville. Note: not to be confused with their old HQ building in Watsonville (which remained within the company and mostly used as a Pavex division office while I worked there circa 2002-2006; though that building had an HP3000 that was older than I was [and one of my coworkers, its primary operator, had been working at Granite Rock Company longer than I had been alive as well] it also had a grandfathered Halon fire suppression system, yikes!) I still kinda wonder what became of Google's (now Alphabet Inc.) Mountain View campus which had previously been SGI's? I mean, I know the campus is still Google/Alphabet's yet at least among pre-IPO sorts of Googlers I knew, they used to joke that SGI had become a real estate company (apparently they maybe still owned the property and leased it to Google? After HP acquired SGI, did HP take the land rights' as well? Did Google/Alphabet ever buy the land? I doubt it's particularly important.)

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