At any carrer hotel you go to, you’ll find a number of small bandwidth aggregators. The model is they’ll usually carry one or two “Tier 1″ (a term that is relatively meaningless anymore) like UUNet or Level3 providers, and then some lower-end providers like Wiltel or Cogent. They’ll setup BGP, and resell their mix of bandwidth. This is what Internap does, but in a much larger scale.

Internap’s model is such that they are in dozens of different carrier-neutral datacenters, reselling all of the “high-end” IP providers that serve that facility. Each datacenter, or in Internap’s lingo, PNAP, is a separate Autonomous System.

Internap registers a separate ASn (Autonomous Systems Number) from each datacenter. This limits the impact on their global customer base. A power-outage at One Wilshire might affect all of their LA customers, but none of their Ashburn customers.

The real problem, is the skyrocketing costs of real estate and IP transit at west coast datacenters. For the most part, the power infrastructures of these carrier hotels are over provisioned, and under maintained. The mentality of modern datacenter providers could be likened to that of a used-car salesman, or a slumlord. Very little thought is put into their customer’s needs in two years, instead all focus is set on meeting today’s sales quotas.

Lesson? No different. Build your infrastructure over multiple datacenters, which have diverse, non-shared infrastructures for power and connectivity.

http://www.softlayer.com
http://www.voxrox.com
http://www.steadfast.net

If you are looking for enterprise class hosting check out:

http://www.rackspace.com
http://www.datapipe.com
http://www.savvis.net

If you are looking for great colocation:

http://www.colo4dallas.com
http://www.choopa.net

For carrier-neutral dc’s you’ll need to find the ones in your area.