If you already know who Equinix is, you know the treat you're in for today. For everyone else, Equinix, who sponsored this facility tour, was founded in 1998 and currently operates over 260 data centers globally, through which flows over half

of the Tier 1 internet backbone. In a nutshell, if you're using a computer right now, which you probably are, like this guy, you are more likely than not touching Equinix infrastructure right now. And guys, I get to take you deep behind the curtain. I'm talking power,

data cooling, security. It's pretty much everything that we do on our channel. Yes, even pool server cooling, except legit. You see, as pretty as it might look, the building behind me was purpose-built from the ground up to be a function-first data center. And that manifests

in a lot of interesting ways. For starters, it was not built from the ground up, but rather the first floor was lifted a few feet off of ground level. Why? Security. Like any Equinix facility, that building needs to be able to withstand a breach attempt from a

vehicle ramming into it. But the city wouldn't let them surround it with ugly barriers. So instead, they lifted up the foundation itself. So if you drove anything less than that city bus into 45 Parliament Street, Toronto, you would eventually regain consciousness and find

the building to be quite unbreached. Honestly speaking, you'd probably have better luck getting inside if you just walked through the front door. JK. Once you get in there, you'll find yourself in a series of airlock-style doors, like this one, with at least

three biometric security checkpoints before you so much as catch a glimpse of a customer rack. Ooh, but I get to go. But what's the big deal? You might think it's just some servers and network switches, right? Well, yeah, but really important ones. Equinix houses critical

infrastructure for everyone from telecommunications providers to cloud service providers to securities exchanges and even governments. To put it in perspective, some poor schlub accidentally overcooked a bag of microwave popcorn at this location and the city sent seven fire trucks on the

off chance that Equinix was on fire and hadn't already managed IT with their own fire suppression systems. For more context, their service level agreement with diesel fuel providers is on par with the local hospital because, well, think about it realistically, is that hospital getting anything done without

data services? Probably not. Let's head up. Here's something cool. Everything in this building except the generators we're about to see on the fifth floor was brought up in this freight elevator. It has a full, fully loaded capacity that's equivalent to about four loaded Mini

Coopers. And this is really important for cloud providers who pre-build their racks offsite. It allows them to wheel a rack into their cage, hook up power, hook up cooling, and walk away. We'll take a look at some of those cages later, but first we need to go all the way up to

the fifth floor where possible. Equinix uses a top to bottom approach to building design, so we're going to go in that order. Why do they design top down? You might ask. That's because if you spring a leak, it's going to go down, so

This floor contains everything that's needed to run the whole building in the event of a major outside interruption. And nothing can leak on top of it, which is especially important for this. Inside the aptly named battery room is enough capacity to run the entire building at

full load for up to 15 minutes. And if they need more time, that's where these come in. These diesel generators are designed to run continuously at a capacity of 2.5 megawatts each. Yes, my friends, 2.5 million watts each. Getting

these up here by the way took some special planning, which I'm told involves cutting a hole in the side of the building, renting a crane, and then sliding them in. Absolutely badass, but there's one small problem. Now they've got to fuel them. I mean, they've got this

little reservoir here, but this will only run one of these bad boys for what, an hour? Well, as it turns out, the main tanks, which include an onsite polisher to remove water and other impurities that can spoil the fuel, those are underground. And this was done because diesel fuel is

lighter than water, and Equinix wanted to design this building such that if the entire first floor was flooded, the tanks wouldn't float away. Wicked smart. The last thing they had to manage was the noise. Oh, the noise, noise, noise, noise. Now, obviously, Equinix isn't going

to hit their 2030 renewable energy goals by running diesel generators 24/7, but they do need to perform monthly checks on them. And I'm told that when you fire those things up, you can't even hear yourself think in here. Now, given there used to be a public library on the other

side of this wall that was a problem, so Equinix designed these acoustic baffles that bring the noise down to the same as a typical city road. And you can, oh wow, can you, you can probably hear the difference right when I go in there. Oh yeah, crazy. Kind of necessary if

you consider that this is about the equivalent of having five bloody trains running in here. Fun fact, before we leave this room, by the way, diesel generation kicks off enough smoke that conventional smoke detectors would be giving off constant false alarms. So this room uses

flame detectors, special cameras that can see through smoke to see if there's actual fire moving into the chiller room. We've got the exact opposite problem. You can fit so much water in this bad boy that is why absolutely no customer infrastructure is allowed under this

room. In here are three main cooling loops. The one behind me is filled with antifreeze that goes between these liquid-to-liquid heat exchangers and the large evaporative cooling fin stacks that are up on the roof. We're going to take a closer look at those in a minute,

but for now, I want to look at the other loops. Those two are connected to what is, in effect, the biggest freaking air conditioner that I have ever seen, except instead of cooling air like your air conditioner does, it cools water. The hot side here carries heat to those same

heat exchangers that we just talked about, while the cold side is connected to the rest of the building through what Equinix calls their bus architecture, which is kind of just a fancy way of saying that it's all redundant, it's all interconnected, and it's all controlled.

by a BMS or building management system and I'll show you why that's cool right above me is our chilled water return which is bringing heat up from the data center floors below okay so far so simple but where does it go well as you can see it gets a little

complicated when it's below 4° C in Canadian winter it essentially passes straight through with the compressors barely running and goes to the heat exchangers on the roof sweet free cooling thanks Mother Nature but then spring rolls around and the outside air

needs some help that's when our highly efficient magnetic bearing compressors ramp up their cooling efforts bringing our thermals under control but wait now it's Midsummer and there's a heat dome we need more cooling Captain thankfully we've got it now most of the time the

misters are not needed but for a building like this you don't design for most of the time and these rooftop fin stacks can either be run bare or they can be lightly coated in water to dramatically increase their cooling capacity it works in the same way that

your arm gets much colder if you lick it before you blow on it the best part is that everything we've seen is fully redundant including cold spares of key components that gives Equinix's team lots of options for load balancing during maintenance and it means that in

the event of an equipment failure or another event Equinix won't risk giving up their nice 99.999 uptime target that's an average of about 32 seconds of downtime per year by the way wow hilariously sometime in the near future all the

The cooling we just looked at will be rendered redundant though when the fourth pipe goes online in the DLWC, or Deep Lake Water Cooling System. If you haven't heard of it, it's basically my pool water cooling setup, except done properly with massive pipes that draw 4° water

from the bottom of Lake Ontario and then pump it into the city to cool office towers and arenas, and well, data centers, that sort of thing. Super cool project. Since we're up here by the way, these freaking blew my mind. Now, as consumers

when we want the lowest latency, say for gaming or video conferencing, we think fiber, right? Well, what if I told you that there's a tier above the speed of light? Well, you'd probably tell me there is not, and you'd be right. You got me, but here's the

thing: light does not always go the same speed, and fiber optic cable slows it down to about 2/3 of its theoretical maximum in a vacuum. Now, that's not enough to matter for your game, but for capital market transactions where microseconds can be the difference between

making your trade and losing a huge opportunity, every competitive edge matters, and that is where these microwave arrays come in. These provide direct line-of-sight links north to the Toronto Stock Exchange and south to New York. Now, of course, for anything where throughput matters, nobody's using these.

So, let's go back inside and look at good old-fashioned fiber. By the way, you guys might have noticed some extra pads and footings for additional equipment up here. That's another nice thing about a purpose-built building: you can plan out your future capacity and then you can

build it as needed This for instance is a spot for another fin stack and here in the electrical room you'll see much of the same thing Look at the glorious extra conduit for future installs Isn't it beautiful This room takes in 13,800 volt power steps it down and

distributes it throughout the building But all right enough about infrastructure How about some customer systems Right The next two floors are very similar so let's go with number four This is the oldest floor and therefore uses some older design paradigms For starters cooling is

handled using cold aisle containment rather than hot aisle containment And let me show you what that means The water from above us is getting pumped into this air handler corridor that chills the air Chilled air then gets carried through ducts to the center of

the customer's cage where a thermal probe, aha, will inform the system when cooling is needed It opens up the motorized vents and then blasts cold air downward It then gets sucked up into the rack which is going to be on either side

and then exhausted out into the room where it gets sucked into that corridor Rinse and repeat Now the main drawback of this approach is that it allows some mixing of the hot and cold air but Equinix still managed a solid power usage effectiveness of

1.42 for this site Since you're wondering by the way I should probably acknowledge that this is an Unleashed space and there are normally strict rules about access to these cages For example exchanges cannot have their cages entered at all during trading

hours and even for Equinix staff unless there's an emergency or contracted work that needs to be done, they are not supposed to be entering customer spaces. So they built these cool access panels where they can run any connections that the customer requests to the outside of

the cage and then the customer can come in and route whatever they need for whatever they're doing. Access to the cages is controlled by access cards and biometrics, either a hand or a fingerprint that's stored as a hash for customer privacy. And any use of your

card is logged on top of the logs for the biometric sensor, the contact sensor on the door, the motion sensor near the door, ah, there it is. And of course, the camera pointed at the back of the rack space. And if all this seems overkill, you

ain't seen nothing yet. Many of the cages not only have physical access barriers but even visual blockers so no one can see any of the equipment in use. And for the extra paranoid, a top cage can be installed to ensure that nobody can climb over the top. Though, of course,

anyone trying to do that would have been spotted by one of the hundreds of cameras in this place. But then, as you probably picked up by now, in this business redundancy is the name of the game. Some cages go even further, requiring what's called double access,

meaning that to get inside, you need both an Equinix employee and a customer employee. And we even saw one with a touch-sensitive cage, so if you so much as leaned against it, a ticket would get automatically created and Equinix security would get an irate phone call.

but wait there's more they told me that some customers will even post a guard who stands outside their cage 24 hours a day 7 days a week financial institutions and government agencies will often operate with a high degree of security like that speaking of financial

institutions certain customers have noticed that if they're closer to each other they can have a physical advantage in connection times well that's not necessarily a good thing to solve that problem then Equinix has a system called equidistant trading that neutralizes any

latency advantage by running the exact same length of fiber to every customer who requires that the spools of excess fiber optic cable are one of the most protected things in the entire facility now I was able to convince them to open the door earlier for a quick B-roll shot

but they wouldn't let us any closer there's a camera pointed at the cabinet and if anyone so much as goes near it security shows up and it's a whole to-do with reports to the SEC and the whole kazoo moving on to the second floor this

place is sick now we weren't able to shoot as much here due to customer privacy concerns but we did manage to get some footage of one of the liquid-cooled cages here building cold water goes into a heat exchanger that pumps chilled water to their high-density

servers these kinds of deployments are becoming much more common but they're kind of an ongoing challenge for standards lovers Equinix at the moment these guys dial in flipping everything down to the colors of the metal posts in their facilities by the way blue means

you hang stuff off them, and gray means they hold stuff up, the more you know. But the lack of standards in the liquid cooling space right now means that these cages often need special provisions, and that's something that they're working with others in the industry to solve as

rack power density continues to scale to ludicrous levels, looking at you AI. While we're here, there's a couple other cool things about this cage. There's leak containment troughs in the ceiling under any water pipes to ensure that even a small leak will be caught and can't fall

onto the equipment below it. And if you look carefully at the floor, there's actually little yellow ropes running around the outside of this cage. And here on the first floor, I see another one. Now, I wouldn't blame you guys for thinking, "Gee, it seems uncharacteristically sloppy"

of these guys to leave this kind of thing lying around all over the place." But it's actually not a rope. They are everywhere in this facility where there's water, and they're part of a leak detection system that tells their team not only if there's been a leak, but

exactly exactly where it was. Boy, would that ever have been handy. Boy, would that ever have been handy. Boy, would that ever have been handy. Since we're here, by the way, this happens to be the newest floor in the building. Remember, top to bottom buildout, right? This one was done about a

year ago, and they refer to this data hall as a as a Mark 1 design. But now that AI has exploded power densities to numbers that would have been unthinkable even 2 to 3 years ago, the Mark 2 designs that they're currently constructing are

aiming at around 10 times the power per square foot that they targeted here so maybe that's something we could see in another video Equinix and how this floor uses a very different system for handling air instead of pushing cold air to the cages now they pull hot air out

of the cages into these chimneys that go up into the plenum which runs into the air handlers now it might seem like an unimportant distinction but the higher the temperature difference the more efficient the thermal transfer and when you're dealing with very high draw racks

this ensures that the hottest possible air goes into the handling it also all but completely prevents hot and cold air from mixing which is a major win for efficiency now I can practically hear you guys shouting if you've got all the hot air in a chimney why don't you do

what a chimney does best and blast it out of the building well you can do that but then you need to bring in air to replace it air that needs to be filtered and that needs to be humidity controlled to handle that at the kind of volume that you would need it's impractical so

even under very extreme conditions like we saw last winter in Chicago I'm sorry but you can't just swing open the doors of a data center and hope that it'll run cooler by the way we didn't show this on the other customer floors but there's

actually two equivalent air handling systems on opposite sides of each floor each with the capacity to handle the entire floor in the event of a failure by the way before we leave the customer systems area I was very surprised to hear that Equinix does not use exotic

fire suppression methods opt instead for standard water sprinklers but then I found out they're not quite standard. See, the pipes are not flooded with water all the time but rather they're full of inert gas, and water only flows into them if two out of three systems go off and a

plastic head melts, so they use heat detection, smoke detection, and the world's most expensive PVC runs. These are part of a VESDA, or Very Early Smoke Detection Alarm System, system that can not only detect smoke but also triangulate where it's coming from to

ensure that only the necessary sprinkler head goes off. They made this choice because oxygen depletion fire suppression can pose very real risks to any personnel who get accidentally trapped. So, good guy Equinix. Let's go to the basement above me, is where utility

power comes into the building, or rather, this is one of the two rooms because redundancy. Right now, interestingly, the power company can actually control this unit remotely, allowing them to turn it on and off and even scale how much power comes in. That is not a normal thing, but

because there's so much power going into this building, in an emergency they might need to call Equinix and say, 'Hey, um, we need more power, could you guys just turn all of this off and island yourselves?' This kind of collaboration is really important because Equinix estimates that

this building draws somewhere in the neighborhood of 3% of the city's entire power budget. If a multi-megawatt load kicks in suddenly without warning or drops suddenly without warning, it is a big problem for grid stability. With that said, they do turn it off and on

regularly, though every year they do a scheduled pull-the-plug test and quarterly they do load tests where they will bring in load banks to ensure that the building can actually power everything that it's rated for. These things sound pretty cool. Basically, if they don't have enough servers running,

they bring in big blocks of metal and they fire up the generators and make them glow red hot. Flipping wild! Finally, there's the fiber room. It's funny, they thought that this was going to be underwhelming and they were all like, "Are you sure you even want to see it?" But it

really goes to show you how numb you can get to cool stuff if you spend your whole day around it. Now, in fairness to them, they are kind of right. I mean, it pretty much looks exactly like the fiber room our building back home. The line comes in from outside, loops around as is

tradition, and then gets spliced or patched to wherever the difference is that I could probably fit my entire family hula hooping inside these freaking loops, and where they go to is even cooler. They go outside to one of the seven manholes that get shared by

the approximately 60 carriers that route into this building. That is what the carrier's access ends. Equinix splices runs from the manholes to this room and then they run it up to the floors above. The carriers only get access again once it reaches their cage. This is how

Equinix enforces the principle of equity of access that inspired their name. Oh, and of course, there are two of these rooms with fiber coming in from two different sides of the building because in the event of a construction worker accidentally cutting one of these or

something they got to have redundancy I got to tell you guys there is so much we weren't able to fully cover If you noticed QR codes on everything those are cool they use AR to direct technicians for fault discovery and to map out customer connection requests um the

18-wheeler dock can be completely closed off for privacy and security when you're unloading racks uh they have employee facilities on site so when an emergency you can shower shave sleep you know your 3 S's um they turn off the lights whenever no humans are detected to save

power they've got grounding strips freaking everywhere they have direct links to their other buildings to turn their entire flock of data centers into a giant redundant mesh guys there is so much more but I think it might have to wait for next time for now massive

thanks to Equinix for sponsoring this video and giving us such an in-depth look at the kind of space that most people are never going to set foot in let alone get a comprehensive tour of hopefully we'll get a chance to do it again sometime if you guys enjoyed this

video hey you might enjoy this kind of high security nobody gets to see it kind of stuff so maybe check out the Intel Fab tour that we did last year

I Can't BELIEVE They Let Me in Here!

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.


Linus Tech Tips

Introduction to Equinix and its global data center operations

Equinix, founded in 1998, operates over 260 data centers globally.

Equinix infrastructure handles a significant portion of the Tier 1 internet backbone.

Most computer users interact with Equinix infrastructure.

The Toronto facility is purpose-built for functionality.

Security features of the Equinix Toronto facility

Elevated first floor to withstand vehicle ramming.

Houses critical infrastructure for various sectors (telecommunications, cloud services, government).

Anecdote illustrating the importance of the facility's operations.

Facility design and infrastructure: Power and cooling systems

Freight elevator capacity and its importance for cloud providers.

Battery room capacity to run the building for 15 minutes.

Diesel generators with 2.5 megawatts capacity each.

Underground diesel fuel tanks for flood protection.

Acoustic baffles to mitigate generator noise.

Three main cooling loops with liquid-to-liquid heat exchangers.

Massive air conditioner cooling water, not air.

Free cooling utilizing cold Canadian winter temperatures.

Magnetic bearing compressors and misters for increased cooling capacity.

Redundancy and high uptime target (99.999%).

Advanced technologies and future developments

Deep Lake Water Cooling System (DLWC) for future cooling.

Microwave arrays for high-speed, low-latency connections.

Future capacity planning in building design.

Electrical room infrastructure and power distribution.

Older floor uses cold aisle containment for cooling.

Strict access rules and procedures for customer cages.

Multiple security measures for cage access (access cards, biometrics, sensors, cameras).

Redundancy in access control (double access requirement).

Equidistant trading system to neutralize latency advantages.

Additional facility features and concluding remarks

Leak detection system using yellow ropes.

New floor design (Mark 1 and Mark 2) addressing increased power density needs.

Standard water sprinklers with inert gas and advanced fire detection.

Utility power entrance and remote control by the power company.

Fiber room and its connection to external carriers.

Additional features not covered in the video (QR codes, dock security, employee facilities, etc.).