Frequently Asked Questions

IDACORE's data center facility is located in rural Idaho, approximately 85 miles from Boise. Our strategic location allows us to take advantage of Idaho's abundant hydroelectric power, cool climate for natural cooling efficiency, and low operating costs, while still maintaining excellent connectivity to major internet exchanges and metro areas.

Our rural Idaho location offers several significant advantages:

• Substantially lower power costs (40-70% less than urban data centers)
• Natural cooling efficiency due to Idaho's climate
• Lower real estate and operational costs
• Access to abundant renewable energy from hydroelectric sources
• Reduced risk from natural disasters
• Lower environmental impact
• Stable regulatory environment

These advantages translate to significant cost savings for our customers without compromising on performance, reliability, or connectivity.

While traditional Boise data centers offer urban convenience, IDACORE's rural Idaho facility provides substantial cost advantages (typically 40% less expensive) while maintaining excellent connectivity to Boise. Our purpose-built facility is specifically designed for high-density computing workloads, with abundant power capacity, advanced cooling systems, and high-bandwidth connectivity, all at a significantly lower price point than urban alternatives.

Yes, we encourage prospective clients to tour our Idaho data center facility. Tours are available by appointment and can be arranged by contacting our sales team. During the tour, you'll see our power systems, cooling infrastructure, security measures, and network capabilities firsthand. You can schedule a tour by reaching out through our contact form or calling us directly.

IDACORE offers flexible colocation options to accommodate various needs:

• Full cabinets (42U)
• Half cabinets (21U)
• Quarter cabinets (10U)
• Custom cage environments for larger deployments

All options include power, cooling, physical security, and network connectivity. We can support standard density deployments as well as high-density configurations of up to 20kW per rack for AI and compute-intensive workloads.

IDACORE's standard colocation environment supports up to 20kW per rack through high-capacity busway power distribution systems and advanced cooling infrastructure.

Power for colocation services is typically billed the following way:

1. Circuit-based billing: You're billed for the power circuits provisioned to your cabinets.

Our standard rate is $100 per kilowatt-month, which is significantly lower than urban data centers that typically charge $160-225 per kilowatt-month. We offer transparent power pricing with no hidden fees or charges for cooling.

IDACORE provides comprehensive remote hands services for our colocation customers, available 24/7/365. Our on-site technicians can perform a wide range of tasks, including:

• Equipment reboots and power cycling
• Visual verification and troubleshooting
• Cable management and replacement
• Component swapping
• Server and hardware installation
• Shipping and receiving management
• Media loading

Remote hands services are billed at $75 per hour, significantly lower than the $150-175 typical in urban data centers.

IDACORE provides a comprehensive range of cloud computing services hosted in our Idaho data center, including:

• Virtual machines (from basic to high-performance configurations)
• Object and block storage
• GPU-accelerated instances for AI workloads
• Database services
• Load balancing
• Private cloud deployments
• Hybrid cloud solutions

Our cloud services leverage the cost advantages of our Idaho facility to deliver cloud computing at significantly lower prices than major providers, with savings typically ranging from 40-70%.

IDACORE's cloud services offer several advantages compared to major cloud providers:

• Cost savings: Typically 50-70% lower prices for equivalent services
• Predictable pricing: Transparent pricing without complex calculators
• Minimal data egress fees: Substantially lower data transfer costs
• Regional advantage: Low-latency performance for Boise and the Pacific Northwest
• Personalized support: Direct access to infrastructure experts
• Hybrid integration: Seamless integration with colocation services

While hyperscale providers offer a broader range of services, IDACORE focuses on delivering core cloud services with exceptional performance, reliability, and value.

Yes, IDACORE is specifically designed to support hybrid infrastructure models. Our facility allows you to:

• Connect colocation equipment directly to cloud resources over our private network
• Maintain high-performance, low-latency connections between environments
• Use our unified management portal to oversee both colocation and cloud resources
• Create hybrid architectures that optimize cost and performance

This approach is particularly beneficial for AI workloads, allowing you to run training workloads on specialized colocation hardware while using cloud resources for development, testing, and inference serving.

Yes, IDACORE offers Cloud On-Ramp services with direct connectivity to major cloud providers including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. These dedicated connections provide:

• Low-latency, high-bandwidth connectivity
• Enhanced security compared to public internet connections
• Reduced data transfer costs
• More consistent performance

This connectivity enables true hybrid multi-cloud architectures, allowing you to leverage IDACORE's cost-effective infrastructure alongside hyperscale cloud services when needed.

IDACORE's Idaho data center is specifically designed to support the unique requirements of AI infrastructure:

• High-density power delivery: Up to 20kW per rack to support GPU-intensive workloads
• Advanced cooling: Efficient cooling systems optimized for Idaho's climate
• High-performance network: Non-blocking 400Gbps network fabric with support for RDMA
• Cost advantages: Substantially lower power costs for compute-intensive workloads
• Specialized AI cloud instances: GPU-accelerated VMs for flexible deployment

These capabilities make IDACORE an ideal environment for training and deploying large language models, computer vision systems, and other AI workloads that require substantial computational resources.

Yes, IDACORE fully supports specialized AI accelerator hardware, including:

• NVIDIA A100, H100, and other GPU accelerators
• AMD Instinct accelerators
• Intel Gaudi accelerators
• Custom AI ASICs and other specialized hardware

Our facility is equipped with the power, cooling, and network infrastructure necessary to maximize the performance of these accelerators. For colocation customers, we can accommodate dense GPU clusters with appropriate power and cooling solutions. Our cloud offering includes GPU-accelerated instances for those who prefer a consumption-based model.

Distributed AI training requires exceptional network performance. IDACORE's network infrastructure is specifically designed to support these demands with:

• Non-blocking 400Gbps network fabric
• Support for RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) for near-bare-metal performance
• GPUDirect RDMA compatibility for direct GPU-to-GPU communication
• Minimal oversubscription ratios, ensuring consistent performance
• Low-latency connections between compute nodes
• High-bandwidth uplinks to internet exchanges and cloud providers

This network architecture is optimized for the intense east-west traffic patterns characteristic of distributed AI training, helping to minimize training times and maximize efficiency.

AI infrastructure is particularly sensitive to power costs, which is where IDACORE's Idaho location provides substantial advantages. For a typical AI deployment, you can expect:

• 60-70% reduction in power costs compared to Silicon Valley
• 30-50% reduction in power costs compared to other regions
• 40-50% reduction in overall infrastructure TCO

For example, a 10-rack AI deployment consuming 200kW would save approximately $210,000 annually on power costs alone compared to Silicon Valley pricing. These savings directly impact the economics of AI model training and deployment, allowing for more extensive experimentation and larger models within the same budget constraints.

IDACORE's Idaho data center is powered primarily by renewable hydroelectric energy from Idaho's abundant hydropower resources. Our power infrastructure includes:

• UPS systems with battery backup
• Natural Gas generators for emergency power
• Automatic transfer switches

This configuration enables us to deliver 100% uptime SLA for power, ensuring your infrastructure remains operational even during utility outages. The local power grid in our area is extremely stable, with minimal historical outages compared to more congested urban areas.

IDACORE leverages Idaho's naturally cool climate to implement highly efficient cooling systems:

• Free cooling: Economizer mode cooling for approximately 85% of the year
• Hot aisle containment: Physical separation of hot and cold air
• In-row cooling: Targeted cooling adjacent to heat sources
• N+1 redundancy: Redundant cooling capacity

This approach results in a highly efficient cooling system with a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of just 1.15, compared to the industry average of 1.57. The efficiency translates to lower operational costs and reduced environmental impact.

Yes, IDACORE's Idaho data center is powered by 100% renewable energy, primarily from hydroelectric sources. Idaho has one of the cleanest electricity grids in the United States, with over 60% of electricity generation coming from hydropower. This renewable energy focus provides several benefits:

• Lower carbon footprint for your IT infrastructure
• Support for corporate sustainability initiatives
• Stable, low-cost power pricing
• Protection from fossil fuel price volatility

We can provide renewable energy certificates (RECs) to document the renewable nature of your infrastructure's power consumption for sustainability reporting.

IDACORE offers multiple network connectivity options:

• Blended IP Transit: Multi-carrier internet access with automatic failover
• Cross-connects: Direct connections to other customers within the facility
• Cloud On-Ramps: Direct connections to major cloud providers
• Private Line Services: Point-to-point connections to other locations
• Metro Ethernet: High-bandwidth connectivity to Boise and regional locations

Our facility features diverse fiber entry points, redundant network paths, and connections to multiple carriers to ensure reliable connectivity.

Despite our rural Idaho location, IDACORE maintains excellent latency to major metropolitan areas through:

• Direct fiber routes to Boise (1-2 ms latency)
• Strategic peering relationships with major network providers
• Optimized BGP routing
• Participation in regional internet exchanges
• Dedicated express routes to Seattle, Portland, Salt Lake City, and other western hubs

Typical round-trip latency times from our facility:

• Boise: 1-2 ms
• Seattle: 10-12 ms
• Portland: 12-14 ms
• Salt Lake City: 8-10 ms
• San Francisco: 16-18 ms

IDACORE's Idaho data center features substantial network capacity:

• Multiple 100 Gbps connections to tier-1 providers
• Total capacity of 400+ Gbps to the internet
• Non-blocking internal switching fabric
• 400 Gbps core network with upgrade path to 800 Gbps
• Redundant network paths throughout the facility

This robust network infrastructure supports everything from basic colocation to the most demanding AI workloads, all with the bandwidth headroom to accommodate future growth.

Network security is a critical component of IDACORE's infrastructure. Our security measures include:

• DDoS mitigation services
• Next-generation firewalls
• Network segmentation and VLANs
• Traffic analysis and anomaly detection
• 24/7 security operations center monitoring
• Regular security audits and penetration testing
• Physical security for all network equipment

These comprehensive measures help protect your infrastructure from both external threats and internal vulnerabilities, ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your systems and data.