New Datacenter In Underground Lair 109
lobo235 writes to tell us that a new underground data center designed by Sweden's largest ISP is fit for a classic supervillain, complete with greenhouses, waterfalls, German submarine engines, simulated daylight and can withstand a hit from a hydrogen bomb. "'Rather than just concentrating on technical hardware we decided to put humans in focus,' he said. 'Of course, the security, power, cooling, network, etc, are all top notch, but the people designing data centers often (always!) forget about the humans that are supposed to work with the stuff.'"
Not largest ISP (Score:4, Informative)
Bahnhof isn't Sweden's largest ISP. The Largest ISP in Sweden would be TeliaSonera.
They're not even in the top 3.
Re:Hm.... (Score:3, Informative)
A lot of power? Not hardly :) (Score:5, Informative)
*NOTE: I design and build data centers for a for-profit company, so I'm biased, but at least educated *grin**
The entire facility is 12K square feet. The DC portion looks like it's around half of it, unless they meant in the description it's 12K square feet of data center space. If so, that's only 1,500 kW to power both the load *and* the HVAC/support gear, unless they're requiring *both* generators to run w/o any 'N+1' unit, and if they're burying their HVAC towers (BAC was mentioned in the article at 1.5 MW of cooling, or roughly a maximum of 425 tons). At your best, you can get a 60:40 ratio since they're underground and have to exhaust heat. Even assuming they can use outdoor cold air in a heat exchanger setup or geothermal cooling w/ groundwater, they won't break 80:20, just due to UPS inefficiencies and air *movement*. So, 1500 kW * .80 = 1200 kW of power to the load side at peak. That's only 100 watts/ft^2. That's pretty low density, really.
Why do I say that? I'm opening new 'small' data centers at 10,000 square feet of raised floor at a time per room, and we build them out to much higher densities of 150+ watts/ft^2. In a recent design, we're putting in a usable total of ~2 MW of UPS in for 10K square feet, and that means we eat another good chunk of power for the ~600 tons of HVAC that requires to exhaust the heat (3x300 ton chillers and several generators that carry different parts of the load). You can very quickly look at a DC even as 'small' as 10-12K square feet and see 3-4 MW of raw utility power being consumed (at peak load when the place is finished out).
BTW, I don't do this for google's stacks of 'homebrew racks' or Microsoft's blade servers or those research center folks that user Beowulf's or Cray's superdense supercomputer apps; mine are normal production centers full of a mix of customer gear like Dells, and IBM and HP and Cisco and Sun and various SANs. And that stuff is breaking 150-200 watts^ft2 these days when packed into standard cabinets and fully populated.
So, that's a neat idea, but I hope that it's going to bill a pretty penny as it doesn't sound cheap to have built. That said, it LOOKS like a cool place to work, so long as they don't run out of money :)
Re:Hoax? (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry about replying to myself, but I thought a video of the construction might alleviate Spazmanias fear of hoaxes:
mms://stream.bahnhof.net/bahnhof/tv8ompionen.wmv (sound in Swedish).
Swedish Pirate Party has its servers there (Score:5, Informative)
This is where we have located the servers of the Swedish Pirate Party [piratpartiet.se].
Part of the reason is that the ISP Bahnhof [bahnhof.se] has taken at stance on privacy issues that we are very happy with as pirates. But of course part of the reason is that it's a pretty cool looking data center. :)
You can find a couple of pictures from when we installed our servers in the data center here [wordpress.com].
Vice Chairman, The Pirate Party, Sweden
Re:wait (Score:1, Informative)
What do you mean "you *could* create an airlock". Any server room worth paying to build or rent a rack in is going to have doors resembling an airlock (not air tight), and positive pressure on the inside that will keep moisture out. Complete with antistatic mats/pads and some of those nice sticky pads immediately outside the door to clean your shoes off.
If you don't feel a blast of air in your face when you open the door to get to the server, they've built it abnormally (and probably wrong). I've even seen one place where there were double doors and the 'entrance airlock' was cooler than the server room so hotter air from the server would be more likely to flow out when it opened.
Dust in server rooms is a bad thing. Yes, microsoft and google have played with trailers using outdoor cooling to save on costs--but when you're providing all your own cooling, the least you can do is use positive pressure to keep it clean.