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Exodus Files For Chapter 11 Protection
rit writes: "Albeit a bit expected, it is shocking to find that Exodus Communications has gone ahead and filed for bankruptcy. Exodus is one of the largest hosting facilities, and their major competitor, Above.net (owned by MetroMedia Fiber) is in pretty much the same boat ... circling the metaphorical drain of the dot-com world." Note that filing for protection from creditors while reorganizing is not the same as hanging up a big "closed" sign -- Exodus is still operating, and hopefully will be able to keep the LEDs turned on for a good long while (since Slashdot is hosted there).
Picked up from an article on zdnet.
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The Exodus data centre in California, one of 43 worldwide, sits utterly undistinguished amid the sprawl fanning out from Los Angeles International Airport. The company's name doesn't even appear on the building, but the unassuming facade, which is wrapped in bulletproof Kevlar, belies its extremely high security, almost to the point of paranoia.
Inside, a biometric hand scanner, another layer of bulletproof glass, two Pinkerton security guards, and a 500-pound door block access to 66,000 climate-controlled square feet of Internet servers, the online backbones of Exodus clients like Best Buy, eBay, KPMG Consulting, British Airways, Virgin, Merrill Lynch, Yahoo, and some 4,500 other customers. It's estimated that as many as one-third of all Internet clicks pass through Exodus servers. In a real sense what's behind that 500-pound door is, well, the Internet.
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One third of all clicks.. whew..!
Rapid Nirvana
I'm a former GlobalCenter employee. Fortunatley I left the company before Exodus bought them off Global Crossing. I had worked for Global Center for about 2 years previously. I watched the data center I worked in grow from one suite to half the building it was in, to the entire building it was in, to adding 180,000 sq. feet down the street.
.com out that has gone bust is just as guilty as EXDS. We had foozball and pool tables, video games, and catered lunches. Just like every other .com out there. It was just the way that things were done.
Every time the company grew it was because the current space was either full or spoken for. In fact, while we were waiting for the 180,000 sq. feet to open we crammed cages in our existing building in places where we never would have before...next to AC units, around fire supression tanks, and even moved the NOC into the office to sell the space in the NOC.
After we opened the 180,000 sq. feet the building began to fill up amid the rumors of an EXDS sale. Yet still everything seemed ok.
The "buy, buy, buy" mentality really was justified. We had sold roughly 1/4 of the new 180,000 sq. feet 6 months before building completion. A building that large requires a _lot_ of network gear. A building that large requires a _lot_ of backup generator power. Many customers (especially financial type companies, of which GCTR hosted many) are very interested in bio-metric hand scanners, kevlar, etc.
For quite a while there it seemed like we couldn't spend the money fast enough. But I don't think that's a problem suffered by the hosters alone. Every
EXDS wasn't doomed by mismanagement, overspending, or anything else that people keep talking about. The problem is that a huge number of their customers went out of buisness themselves, and a majority of those couldn't pay their bills when they left. They expanded when they should have, but now they need to shrink.
To stay alive EXDS should close a bunch of their empty data centers, sell off the extra gear, and use the money they make off that to keep operating. They do (or at least did) have a fairly decent number of large "name brand" customers who haven't gone out of buisness. That should help pay the bills for a while.