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James Bond Villain Data Center
jeet writes "Data centers are boring and NOCs are doubly so. But this one sure beats all of them. Found this video of a data center suited for james bond villain on Data Center Knowledge website.
The facility is established in a hydrogen bomb safe bunker and has generators used in German submarines. The CEO takes you around and shows some other cool features."
Where is hank scorpio's office?
I feel like there should've been sharks with lasers in there somewhere.
Isn't cheaper to just build a building than to refurbish some of these locations?
Since we have seen a lot of this refurbished locations, a smart guess would say 'no'.
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It's usually not cheaper to demolish and build new.
You have the cost of demo, construction, zoning issues, etc. If you can find a location that has many of the characteristics you need, you're usually better off. If you find a location that isn't suitable for much else, you can usually get it cheap.
By the way, the guy in the video looked familiar. At first I thought all the network people looked and sounded the same. But it turns out he's Dean Nelson, Senior Director Global Lab & Datacenter Design Services at Sun and founder of Data Center Pulse. I remember him from this data center video.
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We've read about this particular data center before, though we didn't have this video. The first link in TFA has layouts and other pictures. Very cool.
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I saw no cats.
Isn't cheaper to just build a building than to refurbish some of these locations?
because hydrogen-bomb proof locations are so much cheaper to build yourself! Menards has a kits for sale I hear.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
There are extra costs associated with refurbishing an existing location and the costs might be as high as building from scratch. There is however ONE important difference. Planning permissions. The old building is already there, nobody can complain about it being build anymore because it has already been build.
For some locations there might even be restrictions on tearing it down.
Constructing from new would also have the expense of first tearing the old stuff down. All in all, re-using a building is often very attractive.
In this case, an old bunker is very expensive to build it again. The bunker is there, you either let it rot (WW2 bunkers are still standing beause they are WAY to expensive to tear down) or use it again. The costs wouldn't even be that high, it is a big concrete building, what extra costs are there compared to outfitting a newly build building?
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Fixed that for you.
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No, I think you misunderstood GP's comment title.
It's an reference to one of Kelsey Grammer's many movie roles: Police Detective Brunner in Even Money.
I don't know why GP poster would make an off-topic reference to an obscure and forgettable movie less than 2 years old. But the Slashdot moves in mysterious ways, and its ways are not our ways.
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Looks like a good place for TPB to set up and lock the door.
Most of the stuff on
They are leasing the bunker from FÃrsvarsmakten for 25k Swedish Kronor about $3k per month on a 25 year contract. So its quite cheap.
A friend of mine handled the construction of this one, and is currently building another "bunker data center" for bahnhof.
We're featuring this video on Data Center Knowledge, but it was shot by Dean Nelson of Data Center Pulse, a relatively new industry group focused on information-sharing between end users (vendors and consultants are excluded). DCP started last fall as a group on LinkedIn, and also has a channel on YouTube with weekly webcasts and some other interesting videos. The group has more than 800 members already.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
"It's usually not cheaper to demolish and build new."
According to whom? I'm not sure why the mods currently have this post as +3 informative, but this is false.
By and large, and usually on a case by case basis, this claim is false. It's difficult to make a sweeping claim either way, since there are many issues where people are forced to renovate when they want to build new which can skew the understanding and interpretation of the numbers both ways, but the general concensus is that building new from an empty lot, or building new after tearing down an existing structure, is cheaper. Mainly, because it's faster, and labor costs are a huge part of construction.
It is far cheaper and better to take down and build new, esp. in residential buildings. You start the building from scratch with current materials and with full knowledge of the structure. You don't have to pay labor costs, which are vary but typically are 50% of the actual expense of work, for careful deconstruction that renovation often necessitates.
Most people who renovate do so for one of three reasons. First, they cannot afford a full renovation, so they do it in stages, which is why there more money put into renovation than new construction the United States (which is also particularly striking given people do it themselves, so labor costs are saved which don't seem to be in these numbers, making the disparity between new and remodel even greater). The second is that the code literally forces people to. A lot of city reconstruction occurs before the city insists on keeping a sense of a neighborhood or look or for historical reasons. (I'm not bashing these reasons, just that they are often wholly separate from a safe and efficient structure--they can be interpreted to keep the riff raff aka "blight" from buying up cheap properties, keeping things condemned until some stable can take the property, for valid historical reasons, for limited growth, accelerating growth, etc.)
The confusion often arises where people spend exorbitant amounts renovating in, say, the city. City locations, esp. high end areas, are limited properties; there are often few and far between when they become available, and there are no empty lots. People who desire to live in a particular area must buy an existing house and then strip it down in order to reconstruct the actual home they desire. They then run into zoning codes, which have mixed reasons for being there, often counter to the actual reason they were put in place. (Historical zoning and codes are good for places where people have a desire to live, such as Foggy Bottom and Georgetown in DC, but the same often impedes in a smaller west coast town which views itself as historical and tourist destination but ignores the fact that are a has been destination that no one visit or lives there because of the high crime).
"You have the cost of demo, construction, zoning issues, etc. If you can find a location that has many of the characteristics you need, you're usually better off. If you find a location that isn't suitable for much else, you can usually get it cheap."
Most of these arguments are *for* building new. For building new, there is no demo or renovation cost. Also, you have to be careful when you say zoning issues--some zoning issues force people into renovation even if new construction is better (which artificially inflates the renovation costs and number of renovations). Zoning is the new insidious "do it our way or not at all" that has gone beyond the safety of a building and keeping residential and commercial areas separate, to becoming the handcuffs of well-meaning but misguided city planners.
Even if a structure already exists, the usual impediments to building new are the insistence of local codes to maintain a building's exterior, which necessitates renovation. These are artificial and really put in place by people who want to impede economic reconstruction of a neighborhood, but this is a complicated area with varying opinions.
If you have doubt
It's a data center . It's also in an awesome location (Stockholm), and the building itself (internal and external) looks amazing. You don't have to be a nerd to at least see that this is an interesting bit of information about a uniquely designed data center.
Pro-tip: grow the fuck up.
I don't think the external renovation of the bunker was an issue, though. Also, depending on what the place looked like before the renovation, it could have been basically like having the shell of a building already built for you. I would also guess that there was plenty of primary power and ventilation already in place as well - and depending on condition, could have equated to a huge savings in not having to redo/replace it.
As you point out, a lot depends on the structure being renovated but in this case I doubt there was much in the way of demolition needed to prepare it for being a data center. It looks very open so they might have essentially only had to run cable trays, elevated floors, and walkways.
Regardless of how we posit how much it cost or what would be the better approach, they deemed it economical to put their data center there.
It's usually not cheaper to demolish and build new.
This is also true for software development in my experience. I've learned this through bitter experience.
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By and large, and usually on a case by case basis, this claim is false. It's difficult to make a sweeping claim either way, since there are many issues
So as I understand your argument,
This is a case where there is no "usually". It entirely depends on what you're doing and where you're doing it. Sometimes it's cheaper to build; sometimes it's cheaper to reuse. Trying to make an argument that one rule fits all is silly.
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It is far cheaper and better to take down and build new, esp. in residential buildings. You start the building from scratch with current materials and with full knowledge of the structure. You don't have to pay labor costs, which are vary but typically are 50% of the actual expense of work, for careful deconstruction that renovation often necessitates.
You really don't know what you're talking about.
Let's take a residential example. In my area, a brand new 2 story home runs about $800k+.
There are many 50's era capes and ranches that go for $400-$500k. A tear down and rebuild, from the foundation up will cost over $350k. If you just rip off the roof and build a full second story, redo the first floor, you're looking at around $200-250k and you can move in much quicker.
Want to speed it up even more, they can rip off a roof and set in a modular second story addition in a day.
The point is you have to know what you want to build, if you can find something close to that, that you can build on, you're going to save a lot more money than if you demo and start over.
If you want to build a 40 room mansion, but you're starting from an 8 room house, you don't see the same cost benefit.
With residential construction, you can usually live in the home through many remodeling projects, removing the expense of temporary housing.
You also don't know crap about TOH. It's very rare that they demolish the whole house. The most they generally do is demo down to the framing, only where they have to, and build additions.
The show is called "This Old House" not This New House so they try and preserve as much of it as possible.
It would be cost prohibitive to recreate a lot of the original work, especially things like trim work that you can't even get these days. Look at the Brooklyn Brownstone project they recently did. They spent a lot to repair and refinish all that woodwork because redoing it all over to the exact look would be too expensive. What your normal tear down rebuild contractor would do is just replace it all with the 4" trim you get at Home Depot. All the charm of the home, and value, would be lost.
They also didn't tear down the facade or the framing.
You even seem to contradict yourself in some of the things you say.
As for lofts, they were rezoned residential when manufacturing left the city. To tear them down and rebuild would have been too expensive. Instead they modified them. That was a lot cheaper and made the project feasible. In the beginning, these lofts were very cheap and not desirable but then became trendy and prices skyrocketed as more and more manufacturing left these areas and residential amenities came into the neighborhoods. I used to live in such a building.
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