Europe Data Center Provider The Bunker Opens New High Specification Data Hall in Kent

The Bunker News – KENT, UK – The Bunker, provider of ultra secure Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing, Colocation, and Outsourced IT from within Europe’s most secure data centres, is pleased to announce that it has successfully opened a significant new high specification data hall in Kent.
The former military operations room at its South East facility becomes the latest high specification data hall to open in Europe’s most secure data centre. The new data hall has been fitted out with state of the art power and cooling infrastructure, providing up to 32 amps of UPS power per rack and N+1 fully redundant power and air conditioning.


The facility also benefits from hot and cold aisle separation, dual power feeds, generator back-up and over 150 ISP connections available.
The new data hall in Kent is part of The Bunker’s continuing investment programme, to meet the growing demand for high specification, ultra secure data facilities for fully managed and colocation customers.
Simon Neal, Director of Data Centre Services at The Bunker, said: “I’m delighted with the new data floor at our Kent facility. The ongoing investment allows us to expand our business and provide security conscious organisations with the reassurance of knowing that their hosting and managed services needs are being met in an ultra secure, high specification environment.”
Growing awareness of limited power availability and high prices in London is driving up demand for high power density, out-of-London locations. The Bunker is an obvious choice for organisations that require secure, high specification, managed services and colocation hosting facilities.
“The first customer has already moved in and we anticipate a rapid take-up of space and the opening of phase 2 in the near future.” continued Neal.

Bunker 2

State of the art and military grade
 The Bunker is expanding its Kent operations. The Bunker² maintains the highest standards set by The Bunker by blending state of the art M & E infrastructure with military grade security. The new data centre facility provides an alternative highly secure, low risk Internet hub outside London servicing clients who wish to establish systems in the UK, but who also require access to the World Wide Web without entering the high risk London zones.

The Bunker² offers 12,000m² Tier 3 data floor within the existing defences of The Bunker’s facility, along with 2,000m² of office and support accommodation, staffed 24/7/365 by security and technical personnel. The development will be of a modular low profile design, cut into the landscape with a grass roof. Each module of 2,200m² blends into the surrounding environment with minimum visual impact.

London is the second largest Internet Exchange in the world. Unfortunately London is also one of the highest risk cities in the world.



The Bunker² is a Carrier Neutral Data Centre, situated at a strategically important location on the cross roads of the main Internet fibre routes leaving the UK towards Europe, Asia and the USA. For our clients this affords peace of mind that traffic can be routed via the traditional channels across London, however in the event of a catastrophe, disabling the main Internet hubs in the London Docklands and the City, traffic can still route to any location in the world via the main Internet exchanges in Europe.
The next step for a trusted brand

The Bunker² facility
The Bunker² is owned and developed by The Bunker Secure Hosting Limited. The Bunker delivers secure Managed Hosting and Data Centre solutions from within Europe’s most secure Data Centre and has done so since 1994. Our technical leaders are recognised experts in security and cryptography, renowned for their work on Apache-SSL. Our management team includes Data Centre experts with over 10 years experience. The Bunker is ISO 27001 accredited, are recognized experts in Open Source technology, we are Microsoft Gold partners and practice Prince 2 and ITIL standards.

About The Bunker
The Bunker delivers Ultra Secure Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing, Colocation, and Outsourced IT from within Europe’s most secure data centres.

Our data centres, which are outside the M25 yet within easy reach of London, are military-grade nuclear bunkers purpose built to house the UK’s air defence systems. We run 24x7x365 – our NOC monitors systems both nationally and internationally and is staffed around the clock by system and network engineers and security staff. The Bunker is ISO 27001 and PCI DSS accredited and follows ITILv3 best practice and PRINCE2 project management standards.

Our clients are financial services organisations, technology companies, healthcare, government and other regulated businesses that value a premium service built around security.
For more information visit www.thebunker.net
 info@thebunker.net

The Green Mountain Data Center

The Green Mountain Data Center is adjacent to a fjord, which provides a supply of 8 degree C water that will be used in the cooling system.

Green Mountain Data Center

 Green Mountain Data Center
Located inside the mountain in a former NATO ammunition depot (the largest in northern Europe)
Built for the highest military security level. Secured against electromagnetic pulses (EMP)
"Nuclear secure" facility, secured against sabotage and direct attack from the sea.

Green Mountain Data Center

 Green Mountain Data Center a prime piece of real estate tucked inside a scenic Norwegian mountain. Built next to a cool water fjord and surrounded by evergreens and lush rock-clinging mosses, the space boasts of bright, airy subterranean halls carved out of natural cave walls and almost transcendental settings above ground. This will be the comfortable new home for many of Norway’s data servers. The Green Mountain Data Center is one of the first pioneering data centers that will greatly reduce its costs by harnessing the cooling power of the environment, namely, the steady flow of cool water from an adjacent fjord. Alas, the grass seems to be consistently always greener in Scandinavia.
The Green Mountain Data Center contains nine ‘Mountain Halls’—each spanning well over 1,000-square-meters of space to host rows and rows of servers—a workshop, and an administration building. Its servers will be hooked up to an uninterrupted supply of power from a total of eight independent generators as well as three supply lines connected to the central Norwegian network, and its carbon footprint has been thoroughly eliminated.


Of course its most compelling feature, aside from its generally pleasant, Hobbit-like atmosphere noted by Gizmodo, is the cooling system, which relies on the nearby Rennesøy fjord to provide an abundance of cold water year round to cool its resident motherboards. Facebook has gone a similar route by planting a server farm in the Arctic, but we wouldn’t be hard pressed to say that we like the hospitable environment of this data farm better, and it’s nice to see yet another Scandinavian mountain bunker to add to our favorites!

The Mountain Hall

    Approx. 21,500 m2 floor space in the mountain
    The areas consists of:
    – 6 mountain halls each of 1,855 m2
    (11 x 164 m each) in size
    – 2 mountain halls of 1,546 m2 (19 x 82 m each) in size
    - 1 Mountain hall with internal structure 1,370 m2 in size
    - I.e. combined mountain halls of 15,692 m2
    - Warehouse/workshop 520 m2
    - Administration building 840 m2
    - Quay w/"roll on-roll off" option

 Fire safety and fire
protection

    Closed caverns enable the use
    of inert / hypoxic air ventilation
    Reduced oxygen level to prevent fire and smoke
    - 02 reduced to 15 -16 %
    - Fire cannot arise as the combustion process
    does not get enough oxygen
    - Corresponds to an altitude of approx. 3,000 m
    Hypoxic air ventilation/Inert ventilation system
    - Reduces/limits smoke formation
    - Prevents combustion/fire
    - Ensures continuous operation
    - No fire damage
    - No secondary extinguishing damage (corrosion,
    harm to the environment, poisoning, etc.)
    - No problems with hard disks due to the triggering
    of fire extinguishing equipment

 Safe as a vault

    Located inside the mountain in a former NATO
    ammunition depot (the largest in northern Europe)
    Built for the highest military security level
    - Secured against electromagnetic pulses (EMP)
    - "Nuclear secure" facility
    - Secured against sabotage and direct attack
    from the sea
    "Best in class" data security

 Communication
- redundancy

    High capacity and redundancy
    Local broad band operators
    Good connectivity to the world
    Multiple high capacity lines to Oslo
    Multiple high capacity lines directly to the UK
    Multiple high capacity lines to continental Europe
    Carrier neutral availability

Subterranean “data bunkers”

Subterranean “data bunkers” in unusual locations continue to stir the imagination of the technology world. The latest data hideout to enter the spotlight is the “Swiss Fort Knox” facility deep below the Swiss Alps, which offers ultra-secure data storage in a nuke-proof data center. The facility was featured in the November issue of Wired magazine.
Like many of the data bunkers, the Swiss Fort Knox facility takes advantage of existing infrastructure. in this case an old Cold War bunker built by the Swiss military and designed to survive a nuclear blast. The facility is really two separate data centers about 10 kilometers apart, which were developed over the past 15 years by SIAG (Secure Infostor AG), a Swiss provider of IT security solutions. Two related companies, Mount 10 Swiss Data Backup and SISPACE AG, provide services within Swiss Fort Knox bunker, with Mount 10 providing secure data backup while SISPACE focuses on records storage and management.

The data center also takes advantage of the cooling potential presented by its location deep under the mountains. The facility uses Mother Nature as its chiller, pulling glacial water from an underground lake to use in its cooling systems. It also features survivalist-level security measures, including face-recognition surveillance software, bulletproof plastics and vault doors courtesy of the Swiss banking industry.

More details of the facility’s operation are available at the web sites for Mount 10 and Swiss Fort Knox.

The Worlds Greenest Underground Data Center

Helsinki:The Worlds Greenest Underground Data Center – Planetsave.com: climate change and environmental news (via Planetsave)

Buildings house secret servers that keep Net humming. Not every data center is a fortress..

CHICAGO – From the outside, the Gothic brick and limestone building a few blocks south of downtown almost looks abandoned.

Plaques identify it as a landmark completed in 1929, a former printing plant that once produced magazines, catalogs and phone books. The sign over the main door says "Chicago Manufacturing Division Plant 1."

There are hints, though, that something is going on inside. Cameras are aimed at the building's perimeter. A small sign at the back entrance says "Digital Realty Trust."

Sturdy gates across the driveway keep the uninvited out.

There's good reason for the intentional anonymity and security, says Rich Miller: "The Internet lives there."

Miller, editor of Data Center Knowledge, which tracks the industry, and Dave Caron, senior vice president of portfolio management for Digital Realty, which owns the 1.1 million-square-foot former R.R. Donnelley printing plant, say it is the world's largest repository for computer servers.

Caron won't identify its tenants, but he says the building stores data from financial firms and Internet and telecommunications companies. "The 'cloud' that you keep hearing about … all ends up on servers in a data center somewhere," he says.

There are about 13,000 large data centers around the world, 7,000 of them in the USA, says Michelle Bailey, a vice president at IDC, a market research company that monitors the industry. Growth stalled during the recession, but her company estimates about $22 billion will be spent on new centers worldwide this year.

The need for data centers is increasing as demand for online space and connectivity explodes. Some are inside generic urban buildings or sprawling rural facilities. For all of them, security is paramount. Inside, after all, are the engines that keep smartphones smart, businesses connected and social networks humming.

Some data centers have "traps" that isolate intrusions by unauthorized individuals, technology that weighs people as they enter and sounds an alarm if their weight is different when they depart, bulletproof walls and blast-proof doors, Bailey says.

When Wal-Mart opened a data center in McDonald County, Mo., a few years ago, County Assessor Laura Pope says she signed a non-disclosure agreement promising "I wouldn't discuss anything I saw in there." She hasn't.

Borrowing a line from a 1999 movie, Miller says, "I used to kid about the Fight Club rule: Rule No. 1 is you don't talk about the data centers, and Rule No. 2 is you do not talk about the data centers."

Although the rapid growth of data centers has diminished their ability to "hide in plain sight," he says, many owners and occupants are "very secretive and … sensitive about the locations."

That makes sense, Miller says. "These facilities are critical to the financial system and the overall function of the Internet."

Making new use of the old

Some data centers — sometimes called carrier hotels because space is leased to multiple companies — are in large urban buildings where they can tap into intersecting networks, Miller says

Old manufacturing facilities such as Chicago's Donnelley printing plant often are repurposed because they have high ceilings and load-bearing floors to support heavy racks of servers.

"They are interesting examples of the new economy rising up in the footprints of the old," he says.

Giant companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo and Amazon often build their data centers in rural areas. "They're looking for cheap power and cheap real estate," Miller says. While the number of private centers grows, the federal government is consolidating. It has more than 2,000 data centers and this summer announced plans to close 373 by the end of 2012.

Communities such as Quincy, Wash., population 6,750, and Catawba County in western North Carolina want to become data center hubs. Catawba and neighboring counties dubbed themselves "North Carolina's data center corridor," says Scott Millar, president of the Catawba County Economic Development Corp.

Apple last fall opened a 500,000-square-foot, $1 billion facility in Catawba County. Google and Facebook have data centers in nearby counties and more are under construction.

Catawba County is building a second data center park in hopes of attracting more, Millar says. Because data centers don't require many employees, most of the permanent jobs are created by contractors who provide electrical, cooling or security support, he says. About 400 people work at the giant Chicago data center; many employ far fewer.

The Apple data center, Millar says, is "pretty secretive." No signs indicate what the building holds, he says, "but everybody knows what it is."

James Lewis, a senior fellow in technology and security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a public policy research group in Washington, D.C., compares the evolution of data centers to changes in the way electricity is generated.

A century or more ago, he says, factories and other companies operated their own electric plants to power their lights, elevators and other functions. Those with spare capacity began to sell it to their neighbors. "That's what happened to computing," Lewis says.

Instead of maintaining computer servers in their own facilities for rapidly growing data storage needs, some businesses locate their servers or backup servers in data centers, he says. They can save money because the centers minimize energy consumption, ensure security and allow computers to share tasks. Data centers also give companies places to store backed-up data that is crucial to their businesses.

"The amount of data in the world doubles every couple of years and people … are willing to pay for it to be stored," Lewis says.

He doesn't think it's essential to conceal the centers' locations, though, because hackers won't try to come in through the front door. "The main source of risk isn't physical, it's cyber," he says. "If hiding the location … is all that they're doing, they're not doing enough."

Tall building, low profile

Keeping a low profile is just the beginning of the security measures at Digital Realty Trust's massive Chicago data center.

The exterior is embellished with terra cotta shields depicting printers' marks. The building occupies almost a full block, is nine stories tall and has a 14-story tower. Inside, there are visible and unseen protections, some of which the company won't talk about publicly. There are guards at both entrances, cameras inside and out, motion sensors and much more. To access the rooms where rows of servers live, a card must be scanned and a fingerprint recognized.

The interior of the building is a mix of old and new. Because it is a landmark, its wood-lined two-story library, which has been used for photo shoots, must be kept intact. Some corridors feature stone arches overhead, and some offices are paneled in English oak.

Other hallways are sterile and silent. Inside the locked doors of the individual data centers are locked metal-grid cages and, inside them, rows of black shelving with the blinking lights of servers visible through the doors. The only sound is an electronic buzz. Cameras scan every square foot of the room.

Between the rows of servers are "cooling aisles" with thousands of round holes in floor tiles feeding cool air into the space. Over the server shelving are ladder racks that suspend "raceways" — yellow plastic casing enclosing fiber optic cables. The shelving doesn't extend to the ceiling; air must circulate above the servers to keep temperatures down.

Caron says it costs $600-$800 per square foot to build a data center and often less than $70 a square foot for a normal industrial building, including the land. The giant printing presses that once filled space in the former Donnelley building made it ideal for conversion to data center use, he says. A data center floor must be able to handle at least 150 pounds and as much as 400 pounds per square foot. By comparison, most office buildings are built for 70 pounds per square foot.

Huge amounts of electricity power all those servers, he says: 100-150 watts or more per square foot, compared with 3-5 watts for each square foot of an office building. To keep the servers running, there's more than one electrical feed into the building and backup systems and generators ensure there's never an interruption in power. The Chicago facility has 63 generators.

Digital Realty Trust, which bought the building in 2005, owns 96 properties, most of them data centers, in the USA, Europe and Asia, Caron says. There is, he says, "a lot of demand" and the company expects to spend up to $500 million this year on acquisitions. Last year it spent more than $1 billion , he says.

'You have no idea what's here'

Not every data center is a fortress. The one owned by the city of Altamonte Springs, Fla., is a former 770,000-gallon water tank next to City Hall.

Lawrence DiGioia, information services director in the city of 40,000, says he relocated the city's servers after being forced by three hurricanes to pack everything up to keep them out of harm's way. The tank has 8-inch-thick walls. "It did a great job holding water in," he says, "so we knew it could keep water out."

Even a small-scale data center needs security, though. DiGioia says his is protected by video surveillance, requires dual authentication to enter and a biometric lock limits access to the server room.

It's even harder to get into the five data centers 200 feet deep in a former limestone mine in Butler County, Pa.

"The facility affords a very high level of security, not only physical — armed guards, steel gates, layers of security, biometrics — but also we're protected from the elements, civil unrest, terrorist-type things," says Chuck Doughty, vice president of the Underground, as it's called, for Iron Mountain, an information management company.

Except for the cars parked outside, he says, "you'd have no idea what's here." Besides 7 million gigabytes of digital data, including e-mail, computer backup files and digital medical images such as MRIs, the Underground is home to documents, film reels and computer backup tapes owned by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Sony Music and Universal, among others.

Doughty worked for years on Room 48, an experiment in making data centers more energy-efficient and reliable, and is working now on ways to utilize some of the cold water in the mine to cool the computer space without using chillers or cooling towers. He hopes to begin construction next year.

The security of data centers, Doughty says, is becoming increasingly important for companies and governments "not only because of the situation in the United States with terrorism, but because of the world situation."

Lewis says one of the lessons of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was the importance of having data stored in more than one place. As more data centers are built, he says there will be more debate about legal issues: What happens if law enforcement has a warrant for a server that also contains data owned by other companies? Should there be standards for protecting consumers, including requirements that they be notified of breaches? Should data centers be regulated by the government?

John McKay, a visitor to Chicago from Vancouver, Canada, snapped photos of the former printing plant recently. A brochure highlighting historic buildings in the neighborhood had led him to it.

"What a shame," he said, "that it's vacant."

Iron Mountain finds limestone a natural fit for data center efficiency

Iron Mountain

 Twenty-two stories below ground, deep within the secure confines of a former limestone mine in Pennsylvania, resides Room 48, Iron Mountain's state-of-the-art underground data center. Designed by Iron Mountain vice president of engineering Chuck Doughty, the facility takes advantage of the natural properties of the subterranean location to help the data storage and security company put a dent in its significant energy costs.

"A major challenge was helping our engineers and equipment suppliers understand the basic physics, thermodynamics, and electrical transformation and distribution of this unique location and how they could be leveraged -- and not just apply typical data center designs that have been used for the last 25 years," said Doughty.
The location's geothermal and subterranean conditions open up opportunities for energy reduction that you wouldn't find in a traditional data center. For starters, the natural temperature of the facility is between 55 and 65 degrees, so Room 48 benefits from free cooling. Ducting above the servers pushes air down naturally, using far less power than would be necessary to blow air upward, as a traditional data center would.
Iron Mountain also employs a cold-air containment strategy, which uses the limestone walls and ceiling vents to cool wires and cables hanging above the server racks to increase cool-air distribution by up to 20 percent. At the same time, air pressure differentials force warm air from the servers up and out through perforated ceiling tiles. Room 48 (which gets its name from its location on the underground facility map) has no need for raised floors found in traditional data centers, thanks to the natural limestone walls' ability to absorb 1.5 BTUs per square foot per hour.
Geothermal and subterranean conditions of former limestone mine yield significant savings on cooling
Mother Nature alone isn't responsible for the efficiency gains of the facility. As part of the design, Iron Mountain located the power distribution and air conditioning equipment outside of the facility, resulting in a further reduction in heat while freeing up 30 percent more space for racks.
Room 48 uses motion-sensor, low-power, low-heat lighting to further reduce temperature and costs. Additionally, Iron Mountain opted to purchase run-of-the-mill K-rated transformers and electrical load centers in the data center, the kind you'd find in an everyday electric supply store, rather than pricey electrical equipment typically used in data centers. The company also incorporated readily available, energy-efficient T8 fluorescent bulbs into its lighting scheme.

Iron Mountain's efforts paid off in spades. The company estimates that Room 48 cost about 30 percent less to build than a traditional data center because of its energy-efficient design and use of standard equipment instead of specialty gear. The various efforts to slash cooling save the company hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. Moreover, the natural cooling allows Iron Mountain to boost power in the room to 200 watts per square foot, 50 percent above the 125 watts per square foot used in data centers located in the same underground facility.
"Room 48's design and construction provided a powerful lesson in discarding prior data center design templates and leveraging the natural advantages this unique location provided," said Doughty. "Future Iron Mountain data centers will use the lessons of Room 48 to help design, construct, and operate the most cost-effective data centers, utilizing the geothermal cooling of the underground."

Consumer Broadband Test Update

Consumer Broadband Test Update

March 17th, 2010 by Jordan Usdan - Attorney-Advisor, Broadband Task Force Thanks to the over 150,000 unique users who have taken over 300,000 Consumer Broadband Tests, as well as the nearly 4,000 addresses submitted to the broadband Dead Zone Report. The popularity of the consumer tools has exceeded our expectations.We’ve made some text changes to the short “About” section found on a tab below the Consumer Broadband Test Tool. Some users have been confused by the differences between the two testing platforms presented by the FCC – Ookla and M-Lab – and this section explains the variability
Over the weekend, the FCC also updated both the Android and iPhone FCC Apps to improve the user experience.  The FCC App can be found by searching for “FCC” in either the Android or iPhone App store.
The FCC chose to use two testing applications for the Beta version of the Consumer Broadband Test.  The two applications are among the most popular on the Internet and the FCC hopes to make available additional testing platforms in the future. However, software based broadband testing is not an exact science and contains inherent variability, as described in the About section.  This is why the FCC will also be conducting a hardware based scientific study of broadband quality across the country.  See this recent blog post about this venture, and the RFQ here.  The FCC will use the results of this hardware study for analytical purposes. The results of the software bases testing (see data below) are interesting and show broad trends, but the FCC is not relying on the data for analytical purposes.
Here are the user experienced differences between the two testing platforms:

Metric	M-LAB	OOKLA
Average Download Speed (mbps)	7.04	11.5
Median Download Speed (mbps)	3.95	8.14
Average Upload Speed (mbps)	2.74	2.09
Median Upload Speed (mbps)	0.87	1.01

You will see that Ookla provides a higher overall average and median speed than M-Lab.  This is likely due to the different methodologies these testing applications use.  The difference comes from the fact that broadband speeds vary over time, even within a single second. Ookla measures peak performance and ignores short periods of slow speed, which it considers to be speed bumps in performance, while M-Lab takes many rapid speed measurements and averages them all. For more detail, see the Ookla and M-Lab methodology sections.  Additionally, Ookla and M-Lab each have testing servers geographically distributed across the country.  Individual’s proximity to these testing servers could also affect testing results.

Although software based testing cannot provide users with a 100% reliable measures of broadband quality, the FCC makes these tools available as they provide comparative and relative real-time performance information and helps the FCC collect broadband availability data.

Here are some interesting data and maps from the first six days of the Consumer Broadband Test. This data is derived from the results of both testing applications.

As you can see, 87% of test takers are home users, which is the FCC’s target audience with this application. Additionally, a clear trend is visible across business sizes, high bandwidth connectivity for community institutions, and lower bandwidth for mobile connections. Again, these results are non-scientific extrapolations from the Beta version of the Consumer Broadband test. Additionally, about 98% of user submitted addresses are geo-coding correctly, which is a very good rate.

Given that this is the Beta version, we want to hear from you about additional features we can add to this interface.  We already have some internal plans to rollout an updated version in the near future that provides greater context to users about the meaning of their testing results.

USSHC, a leading ultra secure data center

Welcome to Geek With A Box, the economy data suite on the USSHC campus.  We wanted to give people some of the advantages of the excellent physical and network security present at the USSHC campus, but with scaled back redundancy to reduce the cost.  It’s some of the advantages of being located at a data bunker, but without the costs of being IN a data bunker.  At GWAB you bring in your own rack and UPS (or if you need we can supply) we’ll get you set up with floor space, power, and network drops.  You’ll get 24/7 access with your own keycode for the external door and entry in the fingerprint scanner.  You’ll get web access to video monitoring for the suite as well. Basically, we were asked by lots of people – geeks- that just wanted a good place to colocate their box.  Geek with a Box was born.
Check out our Colocation page for more details on our standard plans, or contact us by one of the methods on the right to discuss something that’s not listed.

USSHC, a leading ultra secure data center company, has launched their Geek With A Box data suite service for economical colocationOnline

PR News – 19-January-2011 –The Geek With A Box product allows USSHC to utilize the extensive infrastructure of our ultra secure underground data center to create low cost suites available for colocation use on other parts of the campus. This allows entrepreneurs and smaller businesses a low cost option for colocation, whether they want to colocate a single server, a rack, or lease an entire turnkey suite.

"We're very excited to offer our clients and fresh startups a way to work with us outside of our usual secured site. One implementation we've already worked on is using our Geek With A Box space for less critical equipment and providing a direct fiber cross connection to another space in our underground nuclear bunker site for databases, backups, and other systems that require an even higher level of reliability," said Isaac Helgens, Project and Marketing Director of USSHC. "We are excited to be flexible enough to make these two very separate products work either together or on their own and provide a new, lower cost opportunity for our clients.

The cost of redundancy and the quest for increased uptime can be stifling to a smaller business or a startup. "The ability to have the best of both worlds without paying a premium is important to these companies just getting off the ground and we think it's a great way to help promote their growth and expansion."

USSHC is the owner of the popular underground data center campus. Its EMP shielded nuclear bunker data center is known for its relentless pursuit of the highest levels of redundancy, reliability, and security. The company employs 10 people in the greater Cedar Rapids area and has been the focus of numerous industry whitepapers and articles regarding high security data centers and disaster recovery. The company’s web site at http://www.USSHC.com contains additional information.

Underground Caverns Keep Things Cold, Safe… and Secret

When WikiLeaks wants to safeguard its trove of diplomatic cables or Kraft needs to keep tons of cheese cold, they head beneath the surface.

Pionen Data Center Stockholm, Sweden

Where does WikiLeaks keep its secrets? In a former military bunker and nuclear shelter under Stockholm’s city streets. Nicknamed the James Bond Villain Data Center, this 8,000-server facility, which could theoretically withstand a nuclear impact, is protected by 24-hour video surveillance and a 2-foot-thick armored door. Two German V12 diesel submarine engines are on standby for backup power. Recycling a war room comes at a price, though: Bahnhof—the ISP that runs the data center—had to have the glass and frames for the walkway and conference room custom-cut to accommodate the curved walls and uneven ceiling.

Photos: Christoph Morlinghaus

 

John Clune, President, Cavern Technologies Data Center

John Clune, President, Cavern Technologies Data Center, Will Speak On President/CEO Panel IMN’s Data Center Forum John Clune, President of Cavern Technologies--the Midwest’s premier underground data center-- will speak on the President/CEO Panel, at IMN’s upcoming Data Center Forum. The two-day event will be held at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, on November 8th and 9th.

John Will Speak On President/CEO Panel IMN's Data Center Forum John Clune, President of Cavern Technologies--the Midwest's premier underground data center-- will speak on the President/CEO Panel, at IMN's upcoming Data Center Forum. The two-day event will be held at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, on November 8th and 9th. October 31, 2010 John Clune, President of Cavern Technologies--the Midwest's premier underground data center-- will speak on the President/CEO Panel, at IMN's upcoming Data Center Forum. The two-day event will be held at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, on November 8th and 9th. The Forum on Financing, Investing and Real Estate Development for Data Centers features leading industry experts who will address the successes and challenges of the data center industry, including over 20 Presidents, CEOs and COOs of Data Center companies. Data Centers, the emerging asset class that investors need to seriously consider for their investment portfolio, has continued growing throughout the recession. With demand doubling every two years, many believe this is the one place where 20% returns are still possible. The major highlight of the conference are the 20 data center Presidents and CEOs who will be speaking at the conferencesays Steven Glener, Senior Vice President at Information Management Network, the forum host. They will be addressing the key financing, expansion, corporate strategy, capital markets, power and technology, from a C-Suite level -- a unique and critical perspective, exclusive to the IMN conference. Cavern Technologies specializes in the development, leasing and operation of build-to-suit wholesale data centers, located 125-feet underground in a 3 million square foot facility designed for energy efficiency, housed in an environmentally regulated, secure infrastructure. Cavern Technologies' world-class data center and collocation facility is SAS-70 certified and designed to meet the specialized power, cooling and security requirements companies need to house IT systems that support their mission-critical business processes. Cavern provides tenants with unique business solutions and a value proposition focused on minimizing the total cost of ownership of data center and collocation infrastructure.

Hunt Midwest seeks tenant for SubTech underground data center space Read more: Hunt Midwest seeks tenant for SubTech underground data center space -

SubTech Data Center is a ground-level facility built inside solid limestone,
offering security unmatched by any other data center facility. SubTech is located in Kansas City, which provides one of the lowest utility costs in the country and is ranked #2 in the United States for enterprise data center operating affordability. SubTech's data center solutions are reliable and flexible, offering maximum power and connectivity for your robust data center needs. Site plans by

http://www.totalsitesolutions.com/
Expanding or needing data center space? SubTech has millions of square feet available for IT and raised floor area. The facility provides clients with data center space ranging from 5,000 - 100,000+ square feet with 16' clear ceiling heights throughout. The initial 100,000 s.f. can be built out in 20,000 s.f. modules. Click here to download our site plan. http://www.subtechkc.com/site_plan.pdf

Ora Reynolds (left), president of Hunt Midwest Real Estate Development, and Tammy Henderson, director of real estate marketing and governmental affairs, are preparing for when a portal (background) will be the front door to an underground data center.

Hunt Midwest Real Estate Development Inc. is getting into the data center business — or rather, under it. Subtechkc

The Kansas City-based company plans to build a 40,000-square-foot data center in Hunt Midwest SubTropolis. The massive underground business complex is roughly northeast of Interstate 435 and Missouri Highway 210 in Kansas City.
Construction on the estimated $30 million SubTech project will begin once Hunt Midwest signs a tenant or tenants for the first 20,000 square feet, company President Ora Reynolds said.
Reynolds said the company originally planned a 100,000-square-foot project but scaled back after an unsuccessful attempt in the summer to add state tax incentives for data centers to a bill aimed at retaining automotive jobs. Missouri is at a disadvantage, she said, because Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Oklahoma offer financial breaks for data centers.
“The investment in a data center is so much more expensive than a regular building,” Reynolds said. “The investment is so large you can’t do ‘If you build it, they will come’ if you don’t think you can compete.”
Reynolds said the company envisions a Tier 3 facility, meaning it has redundant power and cooling systems, with the ability to expand in 20,000-square-foot increments.
“The thing that we’re saying is the biggest advantage, and what makes us different, is we have 8 million square feet that has been mined out and has not been developed at the present time,” Reynolds said. “Somebody who’s out there and says, ‘I need 20,000 square feet now, but I know I’m going to grow and need 100,000 square feet in the next five years,’ we can accommodate them while somebody who has an office building wouldn’t let half the building stay empty.”
She said Hunt Midwest would be strictly a landlord, preferring to find a managed services/collocation firm to become the main tenant, subleasing rack and cabinet space to smaller companies or leasing entire data suites or powered shells — where the tenants install most of the technical infrastructure themselves.
The data center business has taken off in recent years as companies have looked for options to remotely operate or back up data networks.
New York-based Tier 1 Research said in a Sept. 23 report that demand has outstripped supply in many markets because the economy has slowed construction and financing of new data centers.
The underground data center is relatively new in the industry, despite the obvious increase in security and resistance to natural disasters.
Tier 1 analysts Jason Schafer and Michael Levy said in a separate report looking at the SubTech project that so-called data bunkers have had trouble attracting tenants in other markets because of the added complexity of supplying power and getting rid of excess heat and moisture.
They said that SubTech does have size and the ability to grow in phases going for it but that it will run into the same skepticism other operators encounter.
“This isn’t to say that there isn’t a market for a secure underground data center facility,” they wrote. “It just fits the needs of fewer types of tenants that are likely comparing all data center providers.”
Cavern Technologies operates a 40,000-square-foot data center in the underground Meritex Lenexa Executive Park. Cavern President John Clune said the company has grown from four customers three years ago to 35.
“Our market has really taken off,” he said, adding that not having to construct an actual building and underground’s cooler air temperatures let Cavern compete on cost. “The economics of the underground allow us to provide more space for the money.”
Clune said that data centers typically charge as much as $1,200 a rack but that he charges $2,900 for 250 square feet — enough room for four racks.
“It’s when people come down here that the light goes on,” he said.
Numerous area companies operate their data centers, including some in underground space.
Overland Park-based Sprint Nextel Corp. has three data centers supporting network operations, with two built into earthen embankments, spokeswoman Melinda Tiemeyer said.
Other companies use underground caves to store computer data tapes.

What is SubTropolis?

SubTropolis was created through the mining of a 270-million-year-old limestone deposit. In the mining process, limestone is removed by the room and pillar method, leaving 25-foot square pillars that are on 65-foot centers and 40 feet apart.

The pillars’ even spacing, concrete flooring and 16-foot high, smooth ceilings make build-to-suit facilities time and cost efficient for tenants. A tenant requiring 10,000 to one million square feet can be in their space within 150 days. SubTropolis is completely dry, brightly lit, with miles of wide, paved streets accessed at street level.

Hunt Midwest SubTropolis sets the standard for subsurface business developments.

Read more: Hunt Midwest seeks tenant for SubTech underground data center space - Denver Business Journal

USSHC Ultimate Underground Data Bunker

USSHC was founded in 2002. However, the process of creating the ultimate underground data bunker actually started in 1999 with the needs of an Internet Service Provider. It was found that truly geographic IP transit could not be fulfilled by the local telephone carriers due to telephone tariffs. The larger Tier 1 Network Service Providers could not provide higher reliability because they depend on the local carriers to deliver the local access to their network. No matter how services were delivered via these traditional means, there was always a single point of failure.

There are solutions that use fiber rings to deliver services, but even fiber rings have single points of failure: The telephone exchange central offices.

The only way to have true IP redundancy is to have different connections from multiple IP transit providers from opposite directions, that use different local fiber networks, from entirely different companies. Most data centers try to meet these needs using fiber paths from carriers not bound by telephone tariffs. However, this “solution” was accompanied by a host of other problems.

In terms of physical security, every data center investigated shared a common building with other tenants. Either the data center was an afterthought and added to an existing building (server closet that grew in to dedicated space), or it was purpose built but with much office space and other common space in the same facility. Both of these types of shared structures increase the risk of collateral damage due to fires in the same building, and to security risks due to the large numbers of people sharing the facility. The best data center fire suppression system in the world doesn’t do a bit of good if the office above it building burns down on top of the data center.

Major shortcomings in physical security were also a recurring theme during the search for a data center. Many facilities share common space with other businesses. Despite partitioning off a building, the common mechanical facilities such as chiller plant, and electrical, are typically shared with other tenants. Obtaining building wide security is difficult not only due to the different tenants sharing common areas, but due to reception areas in buildings that were open to the public and entirely unsecured. Most “secure” server spaces were found to be secured from public areas by walls made of sheet rock! Some sheet rock walls contained windows! We desired something a little more secure than two layers of half inch thick sheet rock, or a single pane of glass.

Despite finding several facilities that all claimed to be “hardened” and able to withstand the force of a tornado with walls made of reinforced concrete, and at least one door made of steel with no windows to the outside world, further investigation revealed that at most, they were only partially below ground, (walk out basement) and all lacked physical plant equipment that was designed to operate during major contingencies. They also shared office space in the same building. Time and time again, it was found that 100% of the data centers had their heat rejection and standby power systems above ground. And in no case were the generators or air conditioning systems “hardened” at all. While the servers may survive if the data center took a direct hit from even a small EF-1 tornado, they would not remain operational for any length of time once the uninterruptible power supply batteries were exhausted. Even if the connectivity and building itself survived, and a generator was tough enough to operate after a storm or tornado, the external cooling would not. Even with power, the servers would quickly overheat, leading to downtime, and possible data corruption or loss.

Some data centers that claimed to be “hardened” were found to require a constant feed of municipal water for on site cooling. With all of the redundancy built in to the site, the whole data center could fail due to a non redundant source of cooling water that could be interrupted due to a pipe break, power outage, earthquake, or even simple maintenance. Or the whole data center could fail due to a water pipe break that would flood the facility with a high pressure torrent of municipal water.

Then there were the data centers located in flood plains. We were shocked at just how many data centers were located in flood plains. More alarming was the “head in the clouds” attitude that most had about the flood plain being entirely acceptable because the data center was on an upper floor.

The harder we looked, and the more we uncovered, the more discouraged we became. Eventually however, USSHC solved all of these problems, and then some.

The idea behind USSHC was to provide a safe, secure place to house an Internet Service Provider that would be immune from any form of disaster, “deep in an Iowa underground bunker” where the power would always stay on, and the servers would always stay connected, fully online, and fully operational, despite what was going on in the outside world.

Since it went live in 2002, the facility has been expanded to allow other companies to share the same level of redundancy, security, and performance.

In 2009, USSHC opened the GWAB (Geek with a box data suite) to offer an economical alternative to our premium data center colocation offerings.

Innovations for the Data Center

6 Cool Innovations for
The Data Center


1. Fiber optics with a twist

The success of the HDMI cable in consumer electronics has proved that having a common cable that works with Blu-ray players, HDTV sets and just about any set-top box helps remove clutter and confusion. Intel has developed Light Peak following this same approach. It's fiber-optic cable that will first be used with laptop and desktop computers to reduce clutter and to speed transmission, but it could also make its way to the data center as a way to connect servers and switches.

The 3.2mm cable, which is about as thin as a USB cable, can be up to 100 feet long. Intel has designed a controller that will sit inside a computer, and cables are currently in production. Third parties, including Hewlett-Packard and Dell, will start making computers with Light Peak fiber-optic cables in them by 2011, according to Intel.

For data centers, Light Peak presents a few interesting possibilities. Fiber optics have been in the data center since the early 1990s, when IBM introduced its Escon (Enterprise Systems Connection) product line; it connects mainframes at 200Mbit/sec. Light Peak differs in that it runs at 10GB/sec., and Intel claims that the components will be less expensive and lighter-weight than existing fiber-optic products.

"Intel claims Light Peak will be less complex and easier to manage by eliminating unnecessary ports, and deliver the higher throughput required by high performance e-SATA and DisplayPort systems," says Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT in Concord, Mass. "If the company delivers on these promises, Light Peak could simplify life for data center managers plagued by installing, managing and troubleshooting miles of unruly optical cables."

Success here will depend on "how willingly developers and vendors" embrace Light Peak and build products around it, King explains.

2. Submerged liquid cooling and horizontal racks

Liquid cooling for data centers is not a new concept, of course, but Green Revolution Cooling has added a new twist. For starters, the rack is turned on its side, which helps with cable management and makes it easier for administrators to access equipment, and the horizontal rack is surrounded by liquid. A new coolant, called GreenDEF, is made from mineral oil that is nontoxic, costs less than other liquid-cooling methods and is not electrically conductive like water, according to a GR Cooling spokesman.

"The liquid actually moves through the floor and circulates up through all of the computing nodes," says Tommy Minyard, director of advanced computing systems at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, part of the University of Texas at Austin. This means more-effective cooling because heat is moved away from the processors via cables on the sides and under the rack, he explains. Minyard is installing GR Cooling systems in his data center and expects a 30% to 40% savings compared to traditional air-cooled systems.

Data center cooling device

Green Revolution uses horizontal devices for racks, along with a new type of coolant, to reduce energy costs in a data center.

Minyard says liquid cooling has made a rebound lately, recalling the days when Cray offered submerged cooling systems, and he notes that even IBM is moving back into chilled-liquid-cooling some compute nodes.

Pund-IT's King says a major issue is that enterprises have fought the return of liquid cooling in the data center because of the high costs of implementing the technology and because it is unproven as a widespread option.

"Liquid cooling usually costs much more to install upfront than air cooling," says Mark Tlapak, GR Cooling's co-founder. "Compared to air, every liquid cooling system has some added nuance, such as electric conductivity with water-based cooling systems. " But, he says, "spring a leak in the water systems, and you lose electrical equipment." Still, for Minyard, GR Cooling is an ideal fit: His data center gravitates toward dense, powerful systems that pack intense power into small spaces, such as IBM blade servers and the latest Intel processors. The Ranger supercomputer, for example, uses 30kw of power per rack.

3. Several broadband lines combined into one

Enterprises can spend many thousands of dollars on fiber-optic lines and multiple T1 connections, but at least one emerging technology is aiming to provide a lower-cost alternative.

Mushroom Networks' Truffle Broadband Bonding Network Appliance creates one fast connection out of up to six separate lines, a technique known as bonding. The Truffle combines the bandwidth of all available broadband lines into one giant pipe, with download speeds of up to 50Mbit/sec., the company says. Internet access may be through a DSL modem, cable modem, T1 line or just about any broadband connection.

This helps increase overall throughput, and acts as a backup mechanism, too. If one of the "bonded" lines fails, the Truffle connection just keeps running with the other available lines.

Steve Finn, a television producer in Kenya, uses Mushroom Networks' appliance for a program called Africa Challenge that is broadcast to eight African countries. He relies heavily on broadband to produce the content and at one time paid as much as $4,000 per month for connectivity. Speeds vary depending on latency and traffic, but he says the bonded speed is generally about four times faster (four lines times the speed of each individual line), at about half the cost of one equivalent high-speed line.

Frank J. Bernhard, an analyst at Omni Consulting Group, says Mushroom Networks fills a niche for companies that do not want to pay the exorbitant fees for multiple T1 or T3 connections but still need reliable and fast Internet access. Other companies, including Cisco Systems, offer similar bonding technology, but at a greater cost and with more complexity at install, which means the technique has not yet been widely used.

4. Multiple data centers more easily connected

In a very large enterprise, the process of connecting multiple data centers can be a bit mind-boggling. There are security concerns, Ethernet transport issues, operational problems related to maintaining the fastest speed between switches at branch sites, and new disaster planning considerations due to IT operations running in multiple locations.

Cisco's new Overlay Transport Virtualization, or OTV, connects multiple data centers in a way that seems really easy compared with the roll-your-own process most shops have traditionally used. Essentially a transport technology for Layer 2 networking, the software updates network switches, including the Cisco Nexus 7000, to connect data centers in different geographic locations.

The OSV software costs about $25,000 per license and uses the maximum bandwidth and connections already established between data centers.

There are other approaches for linking multiple data centers, a Cisco technical spokesman acknowledges, including those involving Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) or, before that, frame-relay and Asynchronous Transfer Mode protocols.

But unlike some of the older approaches, the spokesman explains, Cisco OTV does not require any network redesign or special services in the core, such as label switching. OTV is simply overlaid onto the existing network, inheriting all the benefits of a well-designed IP network while maintaining the independence of the Layer 2 data centers being interconnected.

Terremark, a cloud service provider based in Miami, uses Cisco OTV to link 13 data centers in the U.S., Europe and Latin America. The company says there is a significant savings compared with taking a "do-it-yourself" approach to linking data centers, due to reduced complexity and OTV's automated fail-over system that helps multiple data centers act as one if disaster strikes.

"Implementing the ability to balance loads and/or enact emergency fail-over operations between data centers traditionally involved a dedicated network and complex software," says Norm Laudermilch, Terremark's senior vice president of infrastructure. "With Cisco OTV, Ethernet traffic from one physical location is simply encapsulated and tunneled to another location to create one logical data center."

Virtual machines from one location can now use VMware's VMotion, for instance, to automatically move to another physical location in the event of a failure.

5. Priority-based e-mail storage

Communication is what drives a business, but too often the bits and bytes of an e-mail exchange are treated in the data center as just another data set that needs to be archived. Messagemind automatically determines which e-mails can be safely archived onlower-cost systems.

The tool analyzes all company communication -- tracking which messages end users read, delete or save -- and then groups them according to priority level.

Data center administrators can use that information to store e-mail based on priority level, which in turn can save money. For example, instead of storing all e-mails in one high-cost archive, messages marked as low priority -- based again on the end user's clicking behavior -- can be stored in lower-cost storage systems. High-priority e-mail can be stored on higher-performance, and higher-cost, media.

That same behind-the-scenes analysis can be used outside the data center, rolled up into a dashboard that managers and end users can view to help them on projects. For example, business units can view e-mail diagrams that show who is communicating effectively on a project and who seems to be lagging behind and rarely contributing.

Pund-IT's King says Messagemind is an intriguing prospect because e-mail has become such a wasteland of broken conversations and disconnected project discussions. Managing e-mail becomes even more painful if a company is subject to litigation, and e-mail becomes part of the legal discovery process.

"Even the best e-mail solutions require employees to manage their messages," says King. "If it works as advertised, I could see this catching hold in enterprises. By managing e-mail more effectively -- and automatically -- Messagemind's solution could take a great deal of weight off the shoulders of data center admins struggling under ever-increasing volumes of stored messages."

6. User accounts virtualized for easier restoration

Virtualization has become the buzzword of the past decade, but it usually involves abstracting an operating system from a server or data from your storage allocations. AppSense is virtualization software for user accounts. It extracts user profile settings from Windows applications and maintains them separately. That means that if an application is updated or changed, the user information is still available. If user settings are corrupted or lost, administrators can restore the settings with a minimum of bother.

Landon Winburn, a software systems specialist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas, uses AppSense to virtualize user-account profiles for his 3,000 students. Winburn says the university used to manage user settings manually, taking about 40 to 60 calls per week related to log-ins. The university also had five to 10 corruptions per day related to user settings.

"Before AppSense, the only solution for a corrupt profile was to delete the profile and have the user start again from scratch for all applications," says Winburn.

But now, with AppSense's ability to restore these settings, the university doesn't have to directly address the problems, since they are handled automatically. By virtualizing accounts, the university could also increase the number of XenApp Server accounts from 40 user profiles per server to about 80.

John Brandon is a veteran of the computing industry, having worked as an IT manager for 10 years and a tech journalist for another 10. He has written more than 2,500 feature articles and is a regular contributor to Computerworld.