Who’s who? Kelly Smith, MD of Smartbunker
A very formal pose is struck by Kelly Smith, the managing director at Smartbunker – a data centre that claims it uses zero carbon energy.
Power used within the 30,000 square feet data centre is free from carbon emissions, being generated entirely from renewable resources.
If this is true, Greenbang wants to know more about this.
They say:
“Smartbunker’s zero carbon energy policy is a preferable alternative to ‘carbon offsetting’ in which carbon emitted by traditional energy supplies is theoretically neutralised by projects designed to extract carbon from the environment.
He says:
“All the elements of design guarantees that our customers have all the service and environmental benefits at no additional cost,”
Kelly has 20 years’ experience in IT. He co-founded Centrinet in 1995.
Smartbunker moves office space underground
by Catherine Woods
Smartbunker managing director Kelly Smith always thought an ex-nuclear bunker would make a great data centre so when one of NATO’s old sites came on the market, he snapped it up.
“We’ve been in business since 1995. I’d heard about these sorts of places and quite often looked at them with envy. Over lunch one day, one of our managers mentioned that there was an ex-bunker quite close to us and that it was on the market,” Smith says.
The bunker is a 30,000 square foot centre with three metre-thick steel and tungsten reinforced walls. In other words, it’s the perfect place to hold data.
Smith bought the premises in 2003 although spent the next four years refurbishing the space. Despite being a lengthy project, Smith says it was much like refurbishing a normal office into a data centre. “It was like an office but totally underground,” he says. “We did things like refurbish generators and raise floors.”
One problem Smith encountered, however, had to do with communication because the bunker was “in the middle of nowhere”. Smith says Smartbunker partnered with BT to improve connectivity to the area. “It’s all very well having a nuclear bunker but if your connectivity with the outside world isn’t good, it makes a mockery of the whole thing.”
The data centre uses power which comes solely from Ecotricity wind farms dotted across the UK.
Pictured is a wind farm near the Smartbunker in Lincolnshire, England.
The underground data centre is the latest in a line of server rooms trying to embrace greener IT, including IBM's recent flat-pack centre and Sun Microsystems' data centre in a shipping container.
The Smartbunker is housed inside an old 1950s RAF radar station. Pictured is the outside view of the bunker - which is disguised to look like a three-bedroom bungalow.
Once inside, the bunker is three-storeys deep and encased in three-metre thick concrete walls.
The Smartbunker is getting a facelift from its post-RAF radar station days. Pictured is one of the underground meeting rooms.
Smith said: "When we tell people about an underground bunker they think of a dingy place with water running down the walls but it's just like a normal office."
The data centre opened for business in June 2007 and currently holds 20 racks of blade servers for its customers.
Pictured are some of the IBM Bladecenter servers currently housed in the Smartbunker.
The majority of the Smartbunker is currently standing empty, awaiting more blades to fill its 30,000 square foot of space.
Smith said: "The Smartbunker has room for tens of thousands of servers and before we reach that capacity we want to have more sites across the UK.
The underground data centre also has a stable temperature. Smith told silicon.com: "With us it's like being winter all the time and we are not at all affected by the sun."
While over-ground data centre power bills can go up in the summer months, Smith said the Smartbunker only has to cool the heat kicked out by its servers.
But the subterranean nature of the Smartbunker did make it tricky to connect the data centre to the outside world.
Smith said putting in the infrastructure was one of the key challenges which timed the launch and Smartbunker had to invest a lot with BT to bring in the connections.
One of the underground entrances to the Smartbunker server rooms is pictured above.
Managed services provider Centrinet has launched what it claims is the UK's first data centre that has zero carbon emissions.
The data centre has been built 100 metres underground in a former-RAF radar station. The so-called Smartbunker's zero carbon branding simply means all the power it uses comes from UK-based wind farms.
The Smartbunker houses blade servers and, because it escapes the sun's rays, it also requires less power for cooling purposes during the summer months.
Kelly Smith, managing director of Smartbunker, told silicon.com: "Whilst we're using zero carbon energy, which is more expensive for us to buy in the first place, by offsetting that power usage with more efficient servers and reduced cooling, we do not pass on those additional costs to our customers."
Smith said: "If you are carbon offsetting you are just using power and paying someone to plant a tree to replace the carbon elsewhere."
He added: "What we are saying is first of all use less power and of the power you have to use don't carbon offset it but use zero carbon power."
Pictured is the view down into the data centre bunker.
Photo credit: Gemma Simpson
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