Datacenter Underground
An interesting idea: if you bury the data center under the ground, 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 center of the city, they will not hurt anyone. Maybe someday it will be. The director of the company Iron Mountain tells the Forbes interview about the specifics of the underground IT infrastructure.
The Iron Mountain underground data center has been successfully operating in an abandoned limestone mine at a depth of 67 meters for several years. The quarry is almost an ideal place for a data center: constant temperature and humidity, absolute protection against earthquakes and even a nuclear explosion (in fact, the data center is knocked inside an underground cliff, although the limestone is not as strong as marble derived from it, but the Egyptian pyramids , made entirely of limestone, has been kept 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 a single gate, carved straight into the rock, which are securely guarded (photo below).
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Next is a long tunnel under the ground.
Iron Mountain employees work in offices with limestone walls, just like inside the pyramid of Cheops.
The director of Iron Mountain says that they buy high voltage electricity and carry out the transformation themselves. If ordinary data centers are purchased for 480 V, then Iron Mountain takes for 2400 V, and recently switched to 4160 V.
Electricity in remote areas is cheaper: they now pay 5.5 cents per 1 kWh, whereas for data centers in big cities, the cost of 1 kWh ranges from 10 to 17 cents.
In terms of cooling, they have not such a big saving, because the mine still needs to be ventilated vigorously. The Iron Mountain underground data center has two Carrier Evergreen 23XRV refrigeration units and one water cooling unit, and for each 1 kW of server power, approximately 0.56 kW is used for cooling, although in standard data centers the ratio of 1: 1 is customary.
By the way, in this mine, Iron Mountain equipped not only a data center, but also a document storage for its customers, a kind of underground safe. Here is a video made last year during a tour of the journalists of the Boston Globe.
The Iron Mountain underground data center has been successfully operating in an abandoned limestone mine at a depth of 67 meters for several years. The quarry is almost an ideal place for a data center: constant temperature and humidity, absolute protection against earthquakes and even a nuclear explosion (in fact, the data center is knocked inside an underground cliff, although the limestone is not as strong as marble derived from it, but the Egyptian pyramids , made entirely of limestone, has been kept 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 a single gate, carved straight into the rock, which are securely guarded (photo below).
')
Next is a long tunnel under the ground.
Iron Mountain employees work in offices with limestone walls, just like inside the pyramid of Cheops.
The director of Iron Mountain says that they buy high voltage electricity and carry out the transformation themselves. If ordinary data centers are purchased for 480 V, then Iron Mountain takes for 2400 V, and recently switched to 4160 V.
Electricity in remote areas is cheaper: they now pay 5.5 cents per 1 kWh, whereas for data centers in big cities, the cost of 1 kWh ranges from 10 to 17 cents.
In terms of cooling, they have not such a big saving, because the mine still needs to be ventilated vigorously. The Iron Mountain underground data center has two Carrier Evergreen 23XRV refrigeration units and one water cooling unit, and for each 1 kW of server power, approximately 0.56 kW is used for cooling, although in standard data centers the ratio of 1: 1 is customary.
By the way, in this mine, Iron Mountain equipped not only a data center, but also a document storage for its customers, a kind of underground safe. Here is a video made last year during a tour of the journalists of the Boston Globe.
Download MPEG4 video ( 7 MB file )
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/74484/
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