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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.
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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.
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.
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
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 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...
*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 :)
Guess you haven't played Fallout 3 yet or you'd know that any stray equipment left after a nuclear war can be turned into an awesome weapon :-)
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
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).