For a long time, the mother of DRFortress’ chief financial officer, Rosa White, thought her daughter sold kitchen cabinets for a living. Likewise, the wife of company president Fred Rodi had a hard time wrapping her mind around what her husband did for a living.

“I explained it to her and she said, ‘Oh, so it’s like DRFortress is public storage for computers?’ Then she was disappointed when I told her that wasn’t quite right,” says Rodi.

It’s a hazard of the job for the founders of DRFortress, Hawaii’s premier colocation and Internet peering exchange provider, but one that they’re used to.

Simply put, a colocation center is a type of data house where customers rent out “suites” or “cabinets” to store their network and mission-critical servers and interconnect to a variety of telecommunications and other network service providers at minimum cost.