engineering

Terremark

Terremark is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Terremark rather than just read about it. In short: Terremark Worldwide, Inc., is a subsidiary of the American technology company IBM. Headquartered in Miami, Florida, the company had data centers in the United States, Europe and Latin America; it offered services which include managed hosting, colocation, disaster recovery, data storage, and cloud computing.

Key takeaways

Terremark belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Terremark to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Terremark from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Terremark Worldwide, Inc., is a subsidiary of the American technology company IBM. Headquartered in Miami, Florida, the company had data centers in the United States, Europe and Latin America; it offered services which include managed hosting, colocation, disaster recovery, data storage, and cloud computing. Terremark employed over 750 people at its Miami-Dade County headquarters.

History In 1980 entrepreneur Manny Medina incorporated Terremark as a real estate company, constructing office buildings. During the dot-com era, an increasing number of his buildings were leased to computer data centers; over the years the company morphed into an information technology services company itself starting with the NAP of the Americas, a large data center and Internet exchange point that hosts one of the instances of the K-root of the Domain Name System. On January 27, 2011, Verizon Communications announced it would buy Terremark Worldwide for $19 a share, in a deal valued at $1.4 billion. Medina received about $83 million from the Verizon acquisition. Verizon completed its acquisition of Terremark on April 12, 2011. Medina left the company at the time of the takeover and Terremark had two presidents in the first year after the acquisition. Currently three high ranking executives are running the business. In October 2013, Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Kathleen Sebelius revealed that Verizon, the web-hosting provider for HealthCare.gov, was the government contractor responsible for "outages that disrupted the website" when it was initially rolled out. A month later, HHS revealed that it did not renew its contract with Verizon, and instead awarded the contract for hosting HealthCare.gov to Hewlett-Packard. In Jan 2016, Verizon confirmed the intention to divest its data center portfolio, with Equinix (EQIX) for a consideration of around $3.5 billion. In May 2017, Verizon confirmed its divestiture of Terremark, selling to IBM.

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Terremark

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Terremark claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Terremark before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Terremark ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Terremark

In research: Terremark appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Terremark in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Terremark is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1980 establishments in Florida, 2011 mergers and acquisitions, Companies based in Miami, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Terremark outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Terremark in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Terremark means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Terremark out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Terremark in simple terms?

Why does Terremark matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Terremark?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Terremark.