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Sun to Create Underground Japanese Datacenter
Kurtz'sKompund writes with word of a Sun project in Japan, one that's taking a somewhat non-standard approach to data center construction. To save on power, heating, and water costs, the consortium is going to be building their center in an abandoned coal mine. The outpost will be created by lowering Blackbox systems into the ground; estimates on savings run to $9 million annually in electricity alone.
If you dig a hole in the ground, water gets in. You need to pump it out all the time. Most datacenters don't need to worry about floods. The article claims they will be 100m below ground. Where is the water table?
the site's temperature is a constant 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit) all year
That is below the recommended temperature for some gear.
The Blackbox containers are robust enough to withstand earthquakes, being capable of withstanding a quake of magnitude 6.7 on the Richter scale.
I'm sure the box will survive an earthquakes, but what about the contents? Most servers don't like to be shaken very hard. You also need to worry about the roof caving in.
According to TFA, $9M could be saved on electricity when using 30'000 server cores. Also according to TFA, 10'000 cores are planned with a $405M budget. If power demand scales directly with the number of cores, this would equate savings of $3M annually. Based only on these savings (which of course won't be the only factor, but since TFS and TFA single them out so clearly), this project breaks even after a measly 135 years or about five and a half times Sun's current age.
A couple of examples come to mind.
The Government of Canada marijuana farm is located in an old copper mine in Manitoba. You can't beat the security, which is something mentioned in tfa. http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2001/08/02/marijuana_010802.html
A solar neutrino observatory is installed in an old mine in Sudbury, Ontario, Canads. It has the advantage of being impervious to almost all kinds of radiation, except of course for neutrinos. http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/
As I look at the other posts, I see lots of naysayers. Well there are at least a couple of cases where old mines have been used successfully for other things.
You raise an interesting point about heat dissipation in an underground datacenter. I remember seeing something on NORAD years ago about the construction of the command center inside Cheyenne Mountain. One of the things that stuck with me was the fact that there was no dedicated heating system: they merely ducted the waste heat from their 150+ mainframes throughout the entire installation. Kept 'em all nice and toasty warm, even in a Colorado winter.