2NPlus1

{ Disclaimer: I met one of the owners after becoming a customer. After reading the review guidelines I think I’m in the clear to post this; if not feel free to flag or drop me a line and I’ll remove it }
Executive Summary:
— Nice power-​dense colocation datacenter in Somerville run by some smart people who understand facilities, networks and how to get the most out of all the fiber laying around boston (dark or otherwise).
— My crazy story: Had a server hooked up to a 250Mbit/​sec internet circuit 48 hours after picking up the phone and speaking with [2N+1]. Helped us tackle a crash-​priority project for a valued client.
There are a number of datacenters and colocation facilities clustered around Somerville/​Charleston/​Cambridge — often in unmarked or unassuming buildings that you’d never look twice at when driving by. These places typically offer higher power density, more square footage or just plain cheaper pricing than downtown Boston sites like One Summer Street, etc.
[2N+1] is locally owned and engineered by people who previously used to run or work for nationally owned local competitors. They saw a site and used their own expertise and contacts to build their own.
I was driven to write this review after one crazy experience that cemented for me how fast and flexible these folks are.
Here is my story:
— My company was contacted by someone looking to move about 20 terabytes of critical data out of the Amazon S3 storage cloud. They needed this data on disks so they could deliver it to a client.
— They approached us because we accidentally got a good reputation for being clever in how we use the amazon cloud and we deal with big storage as pharma/​biotech geeks
— Timeframe: ASAP
The entire problem boiled down to one simple requirement: How to get short term access to the biggest freakin’ internet pipe (s) we could possibly find. The bigger our connection to the internet, the faster we could move 20 terabytes of data out of the cloud.
The same afternoon we talked to this prospective customer we called [2N+1]. They offered us *next-​day* access to a ready to go internet connection rated for 250 megabits/​sec and burstable to 1Gbps.
8am the next day I bought a $ 380 desktop at Staples to use as a quick and dirty Linux control server and the customer had already fedexed us the disk arrays we were to use to capture the downloaded files.
The customer drives did not arrive until late Friday afternoon so we met up again at 8am on Saturday to hook things up. Decided to cap our pipe at 250Mbit/​sec to keep internet bandwidth costs fixed for the project. Set things up and an hour later we were pulling test data from the
storage cloud at *25 megabytes per second* (probably close to the limit of what our last minute crappy consumer server and commodity storage could handle …)
Anyway the moral of this story is that these guys helped us look good in front of a valued partner by getting us access to an insanely fast internet connection in a very speedy way.