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.”

Cavern Technologies builds area’s largest data center underground

Pete Clune, CEO of Cavern Technologies, is pictured in one of the data suites in its underground data center at Meritex Lenexa Executive Park.

Cavern Technologies, located in the underground portion of Meritex Lenexa Executive Park, has begun a $10 million, 100,000-square-foot expansion that will make it the largest data center in the Kansas City region.
The company, which has developed 60,000 square feet of underground space since its founding in 2007, will leapfrog ahead of 1102 Grand LLC in Kansas City, now the region’s largest data center with 110,000 square feet.
Pete Clune, founder and CEO of Cavern Technologies, said several factors were driving the company’s growth.
One is the fact that the data-storage needs of Corporate America are roughly doubling every year and a half, Clune said. Cavern Technologies’ more than 90 existing tenants are expanding their data-storage capacity by 30 percent annually, he said.
Another growth driver is the cost and reliability of electric power provided by Kansas City Power & Light, Clune said. KCP&L charges 8 cents per kilowatt hour, about half of what utilities on the coasts charge.
Cavern Technologies charges its tenants based on power consumed rather than square footage occupied. But as part of its unique data center colocation model, Clune said, it developed the concept of data suites, which allow clients to house servers in dedicated spaces rather than on racks in a huge shared space.
Tenants also like the advantages of having their data center space underground, Clune said. Being “a data center without walls,” he said, Cavern Technologies gives tenants the flexibility of moving and expanding their space quicky. It also protects data from natural disasters and offers a 65-degree ambient temperature that helps tenants minimize cooling costs. A remote energy monitoring system and suite-design recommendations from Cavern Technologies’ staff also keep power costs down, said Scott Herron, the company’s vice president of data center operations.
In addition to providing access to multiple KCP&L substations, Cavern offers high-capacity bandwidth from multiple carriers. The data infrastructure is so robust, Clune related, that a London-based company with space in the center reported that it could send data from London to Lenexa to Scotland faster than it can send it directly to Scotland.
“With Cavern’s focus on the infrastructure piece, including the space, power, cooling, security and bandwidth, our client’s IT department can focus on their unique mission-critical business operations,” Clune said.
The model has attracted some of the nation’s leading health care, financial services, legal and tech companies, said Clune, whose son John is president of the company.
They have guided the underground business to full occupancy in its present 60,000-square-foot-space. In addition, the company has secured commitments for 25 percent of the 100,000 square feet now being built out.
The company will finish the year with nearly $6 million in revenue, Pete Clune said, and will be posting $15 million to $20 million by the time the additional 100,000 square feet is fully occupied.
JE Dunn Construction is the contractor for the expansion. Bell/Knott & Associates is providing the data center design, and Gibbens Drake Scott Inc. is the engineering firm.
Bill Seymour, a senior vice president with Meritex Enterprises, which owns the underground park, said he began working with Pete Clune 10 years ago, when he operated a managed services firm at Meritex.
“I never imagined the type of scale Cavern has now achieved,” Seymour said. “Pete and John have proven the concept, done what they said they would do and give the customers what they want.”

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

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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

Underground Data Center: design, construction, commissioning

http://www.dataspecialtiesinc.com/index.html
Phil Rafferty, President and Co-Founder, has more than 27 years of experience in the data center and cabling industries. Prior to co-founding DSI in 1990, he was the General Manager for a Los Angeles data center electrical contractor. In addition to running the company, Phil leads DSI’s key projects from design through completion. He also leads the company’s efforts to expand its geographic presence.
Underground Data Center: design, construction, commissioning
Data Specialties Inc. was founded in 1990 to serve the electrical and communications systems needs of U.S. corporations. We have stayed abreast of the dynamic technology, climate and security control, reliability assurances and political realities that our clients face—and have become a leader among data center design-build and cabling plan/install specialists. Today we manage all aspects of site selection, design, construction, commissioning and maintenance of mission-critical data centers. We also continuously anticipate future developments, ensuring that our designs deliver the reliability through redundancy that clients expect now and the scalability and flexibility to accommodate future moves, adds and changes.

Baltics - Underground Data Center Former Soviet Army bunker

The most secure underground data center in the Baltics - data center "Grizinkalns". Located in a former Soviet Army bunker - 9 meters above sea level, but at the same time 12 meters below ground. Opened in 2000. TIER I / II infrastructure, carrier-neutral. http://www.deac.eu