I've been touring datacenters for my employer, trying to decide if any of the options in Austin are well suited to our needs. Until recently Austin has been overshadowed by far greater connectivity in Dallas. Austin has been popular for Disaster recovery purposes, having a very low incidence of disasters. (Minimal tornadoes, inland enough to avoid hurricanes and seismically stable geology.) Connectivity is improving, and the MetCenter project near the airport boasts 11 major providers in the campus. DataFoundry is building their huge Texas One facility just south of the MetCenter, with 100MW of design capacity.
Most datacenters today boast biometric security as a major feature. Biometrics have quite a few issues, and have been defeated quite readily. Still, when combined with another authentication method they can effective.
Both datacenters I toured featured Biometric authentication combined with proximity cards and listed such on their marketing brochures. I was disappointed to notice one of them only requiring biometric authentication for the customers. Employees, whose credentials generally allow them wider access to the facility, only needed to be in possession of their proxcard to access the data floor. The facilities manager argued that their security system, which displays the employees photo next to the relevant security camera image every time a door is opened, adequately compensated for the lack of two factor authentication. I'm not sure if this is the case, since both the security guard and the NOC engineers did not seem to be paying much attention to the feeds.
The second facility, I was pleased to note, required two factor authentication of both employees and customers before entering the datacenter floor, and for access to other critical areas.
