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New Datacenter In Underground Lair
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.'"
For a pleasant working environment the data center has simulated daylight, greenhouses, waterfalls and a huge 2600-liter salt water fish tank.
That's quite the fish tank... large enough for certain carnivorous, cartilanginous fish...
Backup power is handled by two Maybach MTU diesel engines producing 1.5 Megawatt of power.
Goodness that's a lot of power, certainly more than a standard set of servers would need. Why, with all that extra electricity you could probably power several deadly lase...OHMYGODWHAT HAVE WE LET THEM CREATE?!?
These will be the sort of projects that will provide the engineering knowhow to build actual lunar colonies.
--
Search Multiple Craigslist communities from one Place: http://www.bigattichouse.com/oneeyeopen.html
meh
No this is actually entertaining.
and just for fun the people at Pionen have also installed the warning system (sound horns) from the original German submarine.
Sorry, but if i'm in an underground bunker designed to withstand a nuke, I would not think it very fun to have sound horns start blaring unexpectedly (as I run down the hallway screaming "you fools! you blew it all up!").
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
I hope they didn't furnish it from IKEA so it looks like a weird subterranean college dorm.
SWITCH
Take a look at these pictures of the Aspidistra transmitter in Britain. Art deco design, curved chrome, indirect lighting, and parquet floors, all in an underground bunker. This was the 500KW transmitter used to break in on German radio stations and create the illusion of a local station within Germany.
The transmitter was purchased from RCA, and the Radio City design made it all the way to Sussex.
Does it come complete with blond Swedish henchwoman too?
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Scorpio!
His twisted twin obsessions are his plot to rule the world and his employees' health.
He'll welcome you into his lair,
Like the nobleman welcomes his guest,
With free dental care and a stock plan that helps you invest!
Beware of his generous pensions,
Plus three weeks' paid vacation each year.
And on Fridays the lunch room serves hot dogs and burgers and beer!
He loves German beer.
Its too bad they didn't use actual pictures. It looks completely rendered.
Especially the last one of the power switches
Cool concept though if it is indeed real.
Until they get half-pony half-monkey monsters and hordes of hungry wolves all over the grounds.
Trust me, I have this on good authority.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
not to throw cold water on this idea (pun intended), but a waterfall creates mist
furthermore, a warm saltwater aquarium, with all of the agitation to keep the fish alive = saltwater mist
hmm, mist + server components (or worse, saltwater mist + server components) = BZZZZT
of course you could put an airlock and dehumidifiers in the server area, but thats a lot of extra expense
but hell, i think when you faithfully recreate a supervillain's lair, you're not exactly worried about being green or saving on power consumption
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Bahnhof isn't Sweden's largest ISP. The Largest ISP in Sweden would be TeliaSonera.
They're not even in the top 3.
That really makes me want to become an EVIL Unix Admin instead of just a normal Unix Admin. I feel the sudden urge for world domination. Um Bork Bork Bork.
I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT
Mom! Christmas Present!
{collapses, quivering}
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This idea WAS invented by Shampoo...
The facility may be real (I'm in no position to say otherwise) but with the possible exception of the last one the "photos" look rendered.
I could be wrong. Just saying.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
This is the same ISP that started a campaign for privacy certification of ISPs and that's fought tooth and nail against Lex Orwell - from general advertising/campaigning to releasing a public awareness-raising (open source) Firefox plugin to stating that they will flat-out refuse to comply with any official wiretapping request. (Swedish-only links I'm afraid)
They might actually need their bunker, with the way this country is going...
True, it does look sweet, however, in order to work there you'll have to wear a standard issue henchman uniform.
Like this - http://tinyurl.com/58pela
Or this - http://tinyurl.com/6a8cvg
Perhaps even - http://tinyurl.com/5nuwl4
I like the original look better.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Why humanize it? The best data centers are dark. Open them up once in a while for a maintenance monkey to swap hard drives in exchange for bananas, and call it a day. Why do they care if the monkey gets to look at a fish tank in between hard drive changes?
John
And their families...
Stay out of Power Dome A unless you've learned Old Magic from your local exterminator.
Now we know what those sneaky bastards at the pirate bay are up to! They're building a bomb-proof underground lair for their torrent trackers!
But not being linked to by Slashdot.
*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 :)
Their data survives a global nuclear war but your customers do not. What is the point of that? Are there people out there who care that after they and EVERYONE THEY KNOW are vaporized that their blog and bank records are still accessible online? Is that something you look for in a data storage center when shopping for that service?
That real estate could be put to much better use by storing things which could help mankind rebuild civilization after a global catastrophe. Nuclear war, global pandemic, impact event, etc. It is not unreasonable to anticipate that kind of thing and prepare for it. It might not be cold enough for a seed bank but surely there are other things which people would need in calamitous circumstances which could be stored there.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
This place is cool, so I checked out their (Swedish) website:
http://www.bahnhof.se/colocation.php
I don't speak Swedish, so a quick run through Google Translate solves that for me:
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bahnhof.se%2Fcolocation.php&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=sv&tl=en
Now, though, I want to know where I get my hands on the wicked nail-filtering UPS!:
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bahnhof.se%2Fcolocation.php&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=sv&tl=en
"The environment in our server halls are dedicated for electronics. Temperature and humidity are regulated continuously, and thanks to our UPS: you're completely free of nails."
So, who do I have to kill in an obscure way to work here?
*willing to wear colored jumpsuit*
Good, the AI needs a backup site where it can remain hidden when it begins the takeover of the world and elimination of the human scourge.
I was just thinking Laird of the Rings?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
This is where we have located the servers of the Swedish Pirate Party.
Part of the reason is that the ISP Bahnhof 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.
Vice Chairman, The Pirate Party, Sweden
Christian Engström, Former Member of the European Parliament 2009-2014 for The Pirate Party, Sweden
The datacenter is built in what was called Pionen; one of several now defunct wartime civil defense headquarters located underground in the Stockholm area. It was built in 1943, and modernized in the mid-1970s. It was meant to be a forward command post, built large enough to contain several rescue vehicles (fire trucks) in addition to the command and control functions, and despite the rumors, it's not capable of withstanding a direct hit from a non-tactical nuclear weapon.
What would be really interesting is if someone bought the Muskö underground naval base and converted it into a datacenter, since that's a SIGNIFICANTLY larger underground structure (its underground area is approximately the same size as the whole of Gamla Stan in Stockholm).
otherwise you would surely have said some of the following:
* It's nice, but my lair has frickin' sharks with lasers on their heads !
* I'll buy it, as a holiday undercome when I get out of my 300 square kilometers underground lair.
Sounds like someone took it a bit too seriously.
I like the ground fog in the pictures. It would certainly be amusing if they had those machines permanently installed, specially since it looks to be dry ice or CO2 based, that can get expensive.
Hmmm.. I wonder if I can convince my boss thats what our office needs.
Dark, dark, dark. I look down those rows of cabinets and all I can think is how much I would hate to pull cables or install gear in them.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
The koi have not been fed in days!
you can smell the salt
there most definitely is such a thing as saltwater mist. sea spray from waves crashing on rocks drifts. salt collects on land near the ocean from the mist, making agirculture difficult except for salt hardy plants. iron implements are known to rust faster near the seashore due to the increase incorrosion from saltwater mist
anything that can be dissolved in water can become a mist if agitated
educate yourself
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What? CTS, using proper capitalization? It can't be true... the end times are nigh!
"This concludes the broadcast from World Control."
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
Sweden found the Stargate!
Soon they will discover new races and the Ori will be all over us!
Bahnhof
"Operating from a Cold War era government command bunker that was purpose-built by the military to house sensitive electronic gear, InfoBunker combines the best of modern commercial technology with Military-grade reliability and government construction to provide the most secure and reliable location for your offsite storage solutions."
"Redundancy
* Facility is over 65,000 square feet
* Fully redundant air handling/cooling systems.
* 2-sided independent A/B main breakers
* 3 Backup 750 KW turbine generators for N+2 redundancy
* Entire complex is multistage air-filtered to 0.3 microns
* Halon fire extinguishers
* Multizoned FM200 fire suppression systems
* Backup 16,000 gallon water based fire suppression"
"Survivability Features:
* Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) shielding to military standards
* Three-foot thick reinforced concrete, all-subterranean construction
* Designed to survive a 20-megaton nuclear blast from 2.5 miles
* Six day diesel fuel reserve
* 17,000 gallon freshwater reserve tank
* All critical equipment shock-mounted on isolation pads
* Nuclear/Biological/Chemical (NBC) air filtration."
God, bless, America. ^_^
I don't know what sort of updraft you get with a 100-foot column of warm air, but the suction might be quite significant. The more heat you generate, the greater the temperature differential, and the greater the gravity-feed effect between the inlet and outlet air-columns.
As for cost, I suppose that they saved some money on not bothering to build false walls and ceilings inside the cave to turn the thing into a more conventional "boxed-in" office. With exposed rock, you'd perhaps be a little concerned about potential dampness (for the people who work there) but if the warmed dry air piped up under the servers is then passing back along the corridors, I guess that'll help to fix any potential "cold damp rockface" issues.
Eric Baird
Mmm. So you might want a decent sound system down there to stop the total silence being too distracting.
And the contrast between the "daylight" light-sources and the more distant dark walls and ceiling is a bit harsh. If they're not whitewashing the walls, I think they need some sort of light-scattering system to reduce the contrast. It's difficult to judge how well the photographed image corresponds to the actual lighting, but it currently looks like they just put in a lot of suspended fluorescent tubes with standard down-deflecting housings, which is bad. Uncomfortable on the eyes.
How about adding a few mirror balls? :)
Now, humidifiers ... you want to place them //after// the servers (wrt airflow), in the central section. You don't want to spend a lot of money on a custom industrial unit that costs a fortune to service: instead, they could just put in a jacuzzi.
Next, since they don't have windows, it'd be a good idea to put in some sort of distant moving images for people to focus on, to help alleviate eyestrain from the monitors and the lights. The spots of light playing over the rock-walls from the mirror-balls would help, but another useful thing might be really big TV screens (maybe put in a few home movie systems with digital projectors). That'd let them project soothing live webcam feeds of woodland and beach scenes onto the walls. And as a purely accidental bonus, could also play movies.
A team of highly-trained masseuses would be useful for stress-relief, too. Especially ones with large breasts.
Eric Baird
This choice represents one of the most important initial design decisions for underground datacentres, because combining the different options isn't sensible. Spiderwebs AND palm trees AND dry ice would look silly.
Eric Baird