November 6, 2009 at 16:27Underground Data Center
An interesting idea: if you bury the data center underground, you can save on a lot of things, including renting a room and a security system. Theoretically, data centers can be buried right in the city center, they will not hurt anyone. Perhaps someday it will be so. Director of Iron Mountain says interviews Forbes, what the specifics of an underground IT-infrastructure.
The Iron Mountain underground data center has been successfully operating for several years in an abandoned limestone mine at a depth of 67 meters. The quarry is almost an ideal place for a data center: constant temperature and humidity, absolute protection from earthquakes and even a nuclear explosion (in fact, the data center is knocked out inside an underground rock, although limestone is not as strong as marble derived from it, but the Egyptian pyramids , made entirely of limestone, have been held for a long time), as well as a natural security system, because access to the mine is physically difficult.
You can get there only through the only gates knocked out directly in the rock, which are reliably guarded (photo further).
Then follows a long tunnel under the ground.
Iron Mountain employees work in limestone-walled offices, just like inside the Cheops pyramid.
Iron Mountain Director says they buy high voltage electricity and do the transformation themselves. If the usual data centers are purchased at 480 V, then Iron Mountain charges at 2400 V, and recently they have completely switched to 4160 V.
Electricity in a remote area is cheaper: now they pay 5.5 cents for 1 kWh, whereas for data- centers in large cities, the cost of 1 kWh is from 10 to 17 cents.
On cooling, they do not get such a big savings, because the mine still needs to be intensively ventilated. The Iron Mountain underground data center has two Carrier Evergreen 23XRV refrigeration units and one water cooling unit, and approximately 0.56 kW is spent on cooling for each 1 kW of server power, although a standard ratio of 1: 1 is considered common in standard data centers.
By the way, in this mine Iron Mountain equipped not only a data center, but also a document repository for its customers, a kind of underground safe. Here's a video made last year during a tour of Boston Globe reporters there.
The Iron Mountain underground data center has been successfully operating for several years in an abandoned limestone mine at a depth of 67 meters. The quarry is almost an ideal place for a data center: constant temperature and humidity, absolute protection from earthquakes and even a nuclear explosion (in fact, the data center is knocked out inside an underground rock, although limestone is not as strong as marble derived from it, but the Egyptian pyramids , made entirely of limestone, have been held for a long time), as well as a natural security system, because access to the mine is physically difficult.
You can get there only through the only gates knocked out directly in the rock, which are reliably guarded (photo further).
Then follows a long tunnel under the ground.
Iron Mountain employees work in limestone-walled offices, just like inside the Cheops pyramid.
Iron Mountain Director says they buy high voltage electricity and do the transformation themselves. If the usual data centers are purchased at 480 V, then Iron Mountain charges at 2400 V, and recently they have completely switched to 4160 V.
Electricity in a remote area is cheaper: now they pay 5.5 cents for 1 kWh, whereas for data- centers in large cities, the cost of 1 kWh is from 10 to 17 cents.
On cooling, they do not get such a big savings, because the mine still needs to be intensively ventilated. The Iron Mountain underground data center has two Carrier Evergreen 23XRV refrigeration units and one water cooling unit, and approximately 0.56 kW is spent on cooling for each 1 kW of server power, although a standard ratio of 1: 1 is considered common in standard data centers.
By the way, in this mine Iron Mountain equipped not only a data center, but also a document repository for its customers, a kind of underground safe. Here's a video made last year during a tour of Boston Globe reporters there.
