InfoBunker

The lure of underground data centers

Subterranean facilities provide security and energy savings — and they’re cool, too.

By Drew Robb - Tech Page One Aug 26 2014


Every evil genius deserves his own subterranean bunker with a supercomputer to plot world domination. The economy being the way it is these days, however, most can’t afford to build their own lair. Fortunately, there are plenty of underground facilities that you can share with other businesses and organizations. There is a coolness about these locations, and not just because the ground temperature is in the 50s year round.
“There is a certain James Bond allure to the underground data center,” said John Clune, president of Cavern Technologies. “Many of our customers utilize the location in their marketing to show how seriously they take data storage and protection.”

One of TelecityGroup’s five data centers in Helsinki, Finland, is housed under the Uspenski Cathedral. Credit: Shutterstock

Here are four companies in the U.S. and Europe that are running underground data centers.

Unorthodox location

London-based TelecityGroup operates five data centers in Helsinki, Finland. One of them is located in a former bomb shelter 100 feet below the 150-year-old Eastern Orthodox Uspenski Cathedral. By using sea water and a heat exchanger, it uses 80 percent less energy for cooling than a typical data center. But not all the heat is sent to the sea. The water first circulates to a heat exchanger serving the city’s district heating system, with the servers providing enough heat for 500 homes. The data center won an Uptime Institute Green Enterprise IT award in 2010.

Data mining

 

Cavern Technologies built a 50-megawatt, 300,000-plus square-foot data center in a former limestone mine near Lenexa, Kansas. Being 125 feet underground means that the site is secure from the tornados, ice storms and hail that can hit above-ground data centers in the region.
“From day one, we have a hardened F5 tornado-proof [261 to 318 miles per hour] structure,” said Clune. “Above ground, it costs up to $150 per square-foot for a hardened shell. On a 100,000-square-foot building, that is a cost savings of $15 million that we can pass on to our customers.”

Secure storage

 The Green Mountain Data Center is a Tier III+ facility located in a former NATO ammunition storage facility on an island in western Norway. Three-hundred-foot-long tunnels connect the data center rooms to the outside world. Although the site is physically remote, high-speed connections mean it is only 4.5 milliseconds from Aberdeen, Scotland and 6.5 milliseconds from London.

One of the main advantages of the site is its energy efficiency. Located on the shoreline, it draws 46- degrees -Fahrenheit water from a fjord, an arrangement that allows a 200-kilowatt pump to produce 26,000 kilowatts of cooling. The system is designed for high-density computing, up to 60 kilowatts per rack. Since it is deep underground, the cooling system never has to offset heating caused by the sun striking the walls and roof. In addition, Norway has abundant hydropower, so the data center operates without greenhouse gas emissions and the power costs about 40 percent less than it does in London.
“We wanted to build the greenest data center in the world and being underground helped in so many ways,” said Jonathan Evans, Green Mountain’s international accounts director.

Cold War bunker

When InfoBunker went looking for an ultra-secure location for a high-availability data center, it wound up taking over a building that was already designed for high-tech applications: a former military communications center near Des Moines, Iowa, that was built to survive a direct nuclear hit.
“From a functionality standpoint the building is performing exactly the same services it did while under military control, only now geared towards the private sector,” said Jeff Daniels, InfoBunker’s executive vice president. “From a cost perspective it was also far less expensive than a greenfield data center project as we could make use of almost all the existing base infrastructure and our [capital expenditure] was limited to upgrading/modernizing systems and building the actual data floor into what was essentially white-box space.”
Although at just 25 feet deep it is much closer to the surface than some of the other underground data centers, the amount of steel and concrete used gives it strength. Daniels said that to replace the building today, with all its hardening and critical systems would have cost over $100 million. But it did also require additional work to drill holes for pipes and conduits.
“The floor is two foot thickness of 6,000 PSI-rated concrete and has steel reinforcing bars the size of your wrist all through it,” said Daniels. “It eats core drill bits like popcorn.”
The facility is designed for 10 kilowatts per rack and uses outside air-cooling nine months of the year, using the heated air to warm the offices. The building stays at about 55 degrees Fahrenheit year-round and can act as a buffer to absorb some of the heat if the HVAC goes down. Waste heat from the servers is used to keep the office spaces comfortable.

Zombie apocalypse

Data centers such as these are even being touted as a place where people could potentially survive a “zombie apocalypse.”
“Despite advertising ourselves as a 20-megaton nuclear-hardened data center we do not anticipate ever being nuked,” said Daniels. “InfoBunker was however nominated one of the top six ‘zombie-proof’ green data centers worldwide.”