this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026
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Barely staffed, yeah.
But locked up pretty friggin tight.
The racks themselves may be locked...sometimes proxcard, sometimes dynamo combination.
They are inside of a locked cage. Usually a combination of two or more...prox, biometric, pin.
That itself may even be inside of a locked room with the same access controls.
To get there, you will need to get past the security guard at the lobby. Depending on who the customers are and what state your in, those guards may be armed.
There most certainly will be a man-trap which will involve speaking to the guards and prove yourself as being a customer. Vendors must be escorted unless the customer got them registered as if they are employed by the customer.
Outside the building, could be guardshacks, likely with motorized gates. Sometimes also barbed wire.
They are also sometimes practically invisible unless you know they are there. There was one I used to work in in NOLA that looked like an abandoned strip mall. There was one in central MA like that as well. A friend of mine owns a data center in Providence that looks like any other abandoned mill building.
Macy's Boston/Downtown Crossing?? Damn near all the Internet in New England flows through the floors above.
Yeah data centers are more secure than some prisons probably. Lots of sensitive data inside owned by a lot of companies, big and small. I've had to register and scan my retinas to gain access to the main building past the lobby. Then multiple airlocks all requiring key card taps to traverse through the labyrinth of cages until I get to a cage that I have access to, and then another card tap to get in.
And if you were somehow able to gain access without being known, if it's your first time inside that particular data center there's a good chance you'll get lost or locked inside somewhere that you can't exit, in an area where someone might not visit for hours, days even. You might actually just die in there like a caged rat.
But also, data centers are great for introverts who like to work in solitude. They're dark, cool, have tons of white noise, and you can be pretty isolated.
Oh and also, if the fire alarms go off you have a short window of time to get out before they flood the place with a gas that you can't breath and you could quickly die.
Oh yeah, only problem is that "dark, cool, tons of white noise" makes me tired as hell.
Or maybe that's because I know that me being in a data center means I've got a loooooong day ahead.
Most the time the data center is lights out. Nobody really needs to go in except for adds/moves/changes to hardware itself.
I very rarely need hands on. I built a pretty robust remote management environment with no dependencies on the prod system. If I'm on-site, there's a problem.
so I watched this fictional movie recently called How To Blow Up A Pipeline...
Sounds like they spend a LOT of money on security. Maybe we can't get through it, but we can test/ probe/penetrate/ attack/ hack/ etc. enough that they have to triple the security budget, and that comes straight out of their profits. They don't like it when you make them spend their profits.
Most of their staff probably is security. The stuff in racks and cages is customer owned.
If I had to guess, from what I've seen in a data center, there's only a handful of "smarthands" on site. Maybe a NOC staffed by a handful of people. A wire tech /LV electrician or two to handle cross-connects. A regular sparky or two for runs to new cages (these are build to spec, i.e. for each cage you're putting in, you probably want at least 2x 220v 30A runs. If you got dense power-hungry compute or a JBOD...that's even more.
Oh yeah, a few HVAC people...depending on how cooling is done. Some places just have a raised floor that gets blast full of cold air, with vents on the cold aisles, and returns on the hot aisles. Some places use in-rows that need refrigerant pipes through. I imagine the latter would need more HVAC staff for maintenance/builds than the former.
1-2 for shipping/receiving, 1-2 janitorial.
I dont know for sure but I'd wager the tradesmen and IT folk are on-staff, not contracted. They always have something to do.
But I still wouldn't be surprised if you told me that a datacenters biggest department (by payroll dollars) was security.
The beauty of datacenters (one of, at least) is the customer being able to put that all on one bill. They charge per square foot for cages, but they also charge by amp available. So a 50A 220v will cost significantly more than a 30A, even if you only draw 12A. And then they charge per-use fees on things like cross-connects (inter-cage or cage to meetme room) or smarthands.
Everything else is rolled in. You don't have to worry about maintaining all your own elec, or cooling. Water leaks? Overheating? Someone else's problem. Redundant A/B power with generators, UPS, and ATS, giving five-9s per side? Got it covered.
Great post. I just learned more about data centers from your post, than EVERYTHING else I've read combined. Thanks!
You should also know their Achilles heel then.
two angle grinders. one with an aluminum cutter and the other with a steel cutter. You can get into basically anything with that combo. cut off the hinges or around the rack locks and just take stuff you didn't spray with metal dust.
Plot twist: you're in the US, so your angle grinder takes 120v but all the outlets in the cage are 240v.
battery angle grinder. really they should require licences. People have used them to steal bikes in public areas and nobody is confronting a potentially mentally unstable individual with a tool that can cut a U lock in a second or two
This is the plot of an Oceans movie.
Oceans
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