If you had to picture in your head a data center, you’d probably think of a drab to semi-stylish corporate or industrial building—something along the lines of the Cyberdyne building in the movie Terminator 2. But a little creative thinking on the part of companies has yielded some facilities housed in anything but your typical structure. From old bunkers to abandoned mines (and even weirder sites), data centers can be found in all types of unique locations.
Why Not a Data Center in Just a Regular Building?
Innovation doesn’t always mean finding the new and flashy—sometimes the oldie is the goodie. And repurposing old structures, even if they’re a little unconventional for their intended use, can also yield cost savings and even some positive press as market observers (and potential customers) investigate a unique facility.
Data centers contain a variety of high-tech equipment, but the structures that house that equipment need not be sophisticated. In fact, sometimes “lower and meaner” can be better. Consider that a major factor in selecting a data center location is protection from natural (and even manmade) disasters. What about an old bunker? If it can withstand a nuclear blast, it can probably withstand a tornado or two. Although such structures may require retrofitting to supply the electrical and network infrastructure to power a data center, the purchase price may well be much less than the cost of standard construction.
Odd structures are often found in odd locales—for instance, you probably won’t find many abandoned nuclear missile silos in major metropolitan areas. As a result, utilities and other resources for supporting a data center may be somewhat scarce in these locations. Nevertheless, for the right company, such a unique location for a data center may be just the ticket. So, duck and cover: here are a few examples of data centers in not-so-conventional places.
The Bunker’s Data Center
The company is called The Bunker, but it actually owns and operates two data centers in the vicinity of London, England. One of the facilities, Ash Bunker, was originally built as a radar control site between 1949 and 1954, according to the company’s fact sheet. “The bunker’s 3.5m [about 11.5 feet] thick concrete walls were surmounted with a sheet piling roof covered in a concrete blast slab 15 feet thick, and then covered with earth.” This site, designed to withstand a nuclear blast (15 feet of concrete probably goes a long way to this end), was later replaced by two new bunkers designed “to withstand a hit from a 22 kiloton thermonuclear bomb.”
In addition, The Bunker also owns and operates the “Greenham Common Bunker,” which was originally designed as a location for holding (and launching) nuclear cruise missiles. The Bunker purchased this site as well for refitting as a data center.
Is it all a gimmick? Well, maybe, but no one doubts the need for security when it comes to IT. In the event of a nuclear war, your iTunes collection probably won’t be too much of an immediate concern, so housing it in a super-secure facility that can withstand a nuclear blast may be overkill. But then, if you’re talking about your company’s critical data, such a site might be ideal if you’re seriously concerned about physical security—whether from common criminals or from well-armed terrorists. The company’s construction of its data centers in bunkers may thus be more than a gimmick for the right customers.
Cavern Technologies’ Data Center
They may not have been built for military purposes, nor are they necessarily capable of withstanding a nuclear blast, but old mines offer a number of potential benefits that companies can exploit when building their data centers. That’s what Cavern Technologies did.
Cavern’s data center, located in Lenexa, Kansas, was built in an abandoned limestone mine. Sitting 125 feet below ground, the facility is shielded from the weather—such as the state’s frequent tornadoes—as well as the vagaries of man. But it’s also built above the flood plain, meaning Cavern’s customers are not likely to find their IT equipment awash in water.
In addition to its unique structure, it also gains the benefits of the Kansas City area’s relatively low power rates, as well as a number of utility and tax incentives. Furthermore, the facility’s surroundings (limestone) effectively act as a geothermal heating/cooling source: in the summer, they limit exposure to warm air, reducing cooling costs, and in the winter, they maintain a baseline temperature, so heating is less of a concern. (Cavern claims a consistent 68° ambient temperature in the facility.) Also, according to the company’s website (www.caverntechnologies.com), the limestone surroundings of the facility are “3x stronger than concrete,” meaning the facility has good stability. The data center offers over 300,000 square feet of space.
An abandoned mine may not sound glamorous, but it certainly sounds adventurous. And it’s a state-of-the-art data center, just like you’d expect in a standard building—not a dark, dank hole in the ground.
Westland Bunker’s Data Center
Companies have used military bunkers and abandoned mines—how about a civilian nuclear shelter? Westland Bunker has constructed what it calls a Tier III+ (don’t tell the Uptime Institute) data center in an erstwhile nuclear shelter built by the owner of an oil company. Located in Montgomery, Texas, the facility was originally built in 1982 as an office building with a nearby—and highly secret—underground bunker next door. This 40,000-square-foot structure, which was originally designed to house 350 adults for as many as three months according to Westland Bunker’s website (www.westlandbunker.com), was intended to be the “bug-out” spot for Louis Kung (owner of Westland Oil) in the event of a nuclear or other society-disrupting disaster.
Westland Bunker has converted the site to a data center, using the underground bunker as the main IT site for critical operations. The company also uses the adjacent 100,000-square-foot office building as a “business continuity and disaster recovery center.”
Altamonte Springs, Florida
Water is bad for data centers (when it’s not confined in pipes or cooling structures, anyways). Certain buildings, like public water tanks, are designed to keep water in—so why couldn’t they be used to keep water out? The city of Altamonte Springs, Florida, followed this logic to its conclusion and built a data center in an existing 770,000-gallon water tank.
Standing within close proximity to City Hall, the building seemed to offer a nearly ideal location for the city government’s IT systems. (Does a city of 45,000 really need its own data center? Another question for another day.) With concrete walls eight inches thick, the tank provides more than just waterproof IT storage—it offers protection from the weather (particularly the wind). The tank resembles a low dome (leading to its nickname, the “Dome”).
As with structures like mines and bunkers, of course, the water tank needed work to prepare it for use as a data center facility. And therein lies the expense of repurposing existing structures: the cost of the building itself may be quite low (or, in the case of Altamonte Springs, it may already be owned), but the cost of converting it for use as a specialized data center may be quite high. Whether using a repurposed building is cost effective depends, of course, on the details. Retrofitting a huge water tank may be simpler than retrofitting the bottom of a 100-foot-plus-deep mine. But it’s been done—some companies apparently believe they can make it work.
Of course, given the deplorable finances of many governments—local, state and national—one can’t exactly assume that the water tank idea would be feasible for a company that actually has to turn a profit. But it’s certainly a novel idea worth noting.
Other Interesting Places
The above examples are just a few structures repurposed for use as data centers. Iron Mountain, an information management and storage company, maintains an underground data center in a 220-foot-deep limestone cave near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This facility is able to exploit some of the same benefits as the Cavern Technologies data center in Kansas.
Another example of a unique location is the CLUMEQ supercomputer data center built in an erstwhile van de Graaf accelerator silo measuring about 65 feet in height with a diameter of 36 feet. Although this structure is not big enough for a mega colocation data center, it exemplifies an interesting refit for smaller-scale needs.
Be on the lookout for even more examples of data centers built in repurposed structures. Of course, some structures lend themselves to this use better than others; for example, a nuclear missile silo sounds like a cool option (these have even been used by some people as living spaces), but limited floor space and other considerations may make it impractical for anything but a small facility. More mundane refits, such as those involving more traditional building structures, are numerous, but they don’t quite have the distinctiveness of, say, a cave or a bunker capable of withstanding a nuclear bomb. But data center buildings run the gamut from traditional and unremarkable to downright odd.
So, Why Such a Weird Location?
Building a state-of-the-art facility like a data center in a structure originally intended for some other purpose—such as a mine or bunker—may sound ridiculous at first. And in some ways, this type of construction offers challenges you wouldn’t experience in traditional construction. For instance, you’d likely have a harder time finding someone with experience in both data center design and construction in a mine or bunker. But the above companies show it can be done.
Reasonable people can debate whether these structures really offer vastly superior security relative to other structures. Is the ability to withstand a nuclear blast really that helpful if everything around the facility gets vaporized? Okay, so maybe that’s not the point. A bunker (or other underground facility) has an appearance of strength that can be a good deterrent to would-be trespassers, and its stability and weatherproof features can lessen the likelihood of natural disasters affecting availability.
These facilities take advantage of construction work that’s already been done, and when the site can be purchased for bargain prices, the company can benefit greatly from reduced capital costs. On the other hand, adding infrastructure to a mine more than 100 feet below the ground can be challenging—and therefore expensive. These types of facilities each present other challenges as well—they’re certainly not for everyone. But perhaps the greatest benefit is psychological: these facilities just look and sound cool. That added appeal draws press and customer attention. Sure, some potential customers might shy away from a novel approach, thinking instead that a traditional data center is more to their liking, but the companies that build their data centers in unique locations don’t need to win everybody over. They just need to win enough customers to make use of their resources—and their locations (with their distinctive features) help set these facilities apart.
