This review is related to their data center services specifically. On the whole, this business is…read morewell done. I manage equipment in many of the big data centers, including Equinix (San Jose), Digital Realty, 365Main (San Francisco), MAE-West, Switch/NAP7 & Information Sciences Institute. Nobody has quite the extent of security I've seen in Northborough although 'Switch' data center in Las Vegas is a close 2nd.
SECURITY = INCONVENIENCE/FRUSTRATION: That security comes at a price. Iron Mountain mandates a background check be completed before customers can have access to the datacenter without an escort. Escorts are only available weekdays from roughly 7am eastern time until 4pm eastern time. Accessing your equipment outside of those hours will incur a charge since they have to obtain an on-call "smart hands" staffer to come serve as your shadow. The people at the Northborough facility who act as chaperones are quite nice and they're even willing to help you with cabling & lifting as you setup your racks.
Pro tip to new co-lo customers: be aggressive about completing the Background Investigation or it'll take months to get unescorted data center access. Iron Mountain does not track your background app process. Urge them to send you their documents and fill them out immediately. You must fill out a Word Doc followed by an on-line application. Once those are complete there's still another two weeks waiting time for your BG check to complete.
THE SERVICES: This facility has plenty of redundant power, both to the grid, by way of diesel generators and built-in UPS battery backup (no need to bring your own UPS!). They can provide whatever power plug and amperage you want in your cage/rack and you can even request an assortment (e.g. NEMA L6 30 Amp 208v, NEMA L5 20 Amp 110v).
Bandwidth & latency function as expected. I see roughly 80ms round trip times between Santa Cruz, California & Massachusetts. Having only been with the company 3 weeks at the time of this writing I can't speak to the reliability over the long haul. Given their power redundancy I'd assume their data redundancy is equally thorough.
COMMUNICATING IS DIFFICULT: Any time you need something, they make you go through the trouble ticket system. This form only allows 2000 characters which is not enough space if you need to paste several long URLs or a configuration snippet. The web form itself requires an awkward 5 minute ordeal getting logged in, selecting all the right pop-us and being told after the fact your message contains too many characters (2000 or more).
The worst part is they tend to close the ticket without any confirmation from the customer that the matter is handled. When they do this it means you have to open the exact same ticket AGAIN to ask the same question or make the same request. They have NO CHAT offering whatsoever. There's no Slack channel, no Google Hangouts, no Skype, no Twitter. Microsoft Lync is only available when one pre-schedules a meeting with the team. This is 2017. IMO, we need to be able to type interactively with people.
Aside from the communications disaster above, it is a decent business. If you don't mind filling out web forms and using the phone a lot, they're A-OK. I'd recommend them to anyone setting up servers in the central Massachusetts if an option like EQUINIX was not available.
