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Florida Town Builds Data Center In Water Tank
miller60 writes "The Florida town of Altamonte Springs has converted an old water storage tank into a new data center. The decommissioned tank previously held up to 770,000 gallons of water, but its 18-inch-thick walls provided a hurricane-proof home for the town's IT gear, which had to be relocated three times in 2004 to ride out major storms. The Altamonte Springs facility is the latest example of data centers in strange places, including chapels, shopping malls, cargo ships, old particle accelerators and caves."
You just dive in and swim to the server racks.
Why didn't they just use some colo company and save a bunch of money on maintenance and headcount?
...is more compute power, memory and disk than the Cray-2 I did my dissertation work on.
Crystal Peak? I guess O'Connor would deserve a more modern equipment.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I lived in Altamonte Springs for three years, working as a contractor in the area. Nice place, if a little on the warm side in August. :)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
How are this strange places? A data centre doesn't need windows, doesn't need easy highway access, doesn't need to sit next to the subway station or even close to high populated areas (close as in walking distance) - it's a bit like a "build and forget" kind of structure that are best kept a bit out of the way.
So you're naturally looking for cheap space, that is safe against the elements. Existing strong buildings come in play of course - like this water tank. Chapels are also often constructed well. Same for former bunkers and other underground locations like abandoned mines.
Yes it's interesting, maybe not obvious, but thinking about it this are not strange places but actually quite logical places to build your data centre. The only one that sounds strange to me is the shopping mall one. Space in shopping malls tends to be pretty expensive.
RTFA, it's made of 8" reinforced concrete. My bigger problem with the article was the use of optical media for archiving, get a real archival solution and use good tape like LTO.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
...in your mom!
"Tapes are unreliable," DiGioia says. "Disaster recovery was nonexistent. It consisted of backup tapes in a box." ... "Backups are kept on disk for 30 days and then overwritten, and tape is no longer used. Documents are archived on optical disc and microfilm. "
...so, 30 days on a mirrored SAN. No monthlies, yearlies. Long term is on optical (what kind? Consumer media degrades... What's the retention target?) and microfilm (quaint).
So, the quick recovery offered by the mirrored SAN is sexy, with an appropriate price tag. Writing off tape entirely seems very wrong.
What? No grain solo? I've heard of plans for a grain solo in Australia to be turned into one.
Seriously - I hope that somebody put some long hard thought into how they are going to try to ground this thing.
Um, the cold water pipe?
Not all water tanks are metal. Plus, this is not a water TOWER. It's a water tank that sits on the ground. You didn't even have to RTFA, just had to look at the picture.
Don't put your data centers in caves, mines, hurricane proof water tanks, etc.
When the time comes that we need to unplug skynet, you are just making things hard.
Summary is inaccurate (as usual):
TFS: 18-inch walls
TFA: 8-inch walls
The article states 8" concrete walls, although 18" makes sense as it is about the practical minimum if you design for crack protection. A concrete building is a natural for disaster protection, nothing too outlandish there. The last firm I worked for built a concrete vault for their server room, complete with bank vault door.
Although a working water storage tank would be way more fun, basically using the water system as a giant heat sink!
From the picture caption in TFA: The city's water tank data center: Wings were added to each side, one for networking equipment, the other for administrative offices.
And in the body of TFA: Compared with the old setup, the new infrastructure offers improved uptime and superior disaster recovery capabilities. and The emergency operation center was shut down also because there wasn't infrastructure in place to support Internet access during a storm
So then exactly why is the networking equipment outside of the protected space?
this is my sig
Good thing they didn't convert a new water storage tank into an old data center.
"Area Data Center Actually Located in Data Center Facility; IT Experts Confused, Baffled"
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
The dome-shaped tank offered 8-inch-thick walls of reinforced concrete and was
8, 18, close enough I guess.
Be the new you! Add or subtract 10 inches to your server room walls now!
!!! www.v1agra-weigthloss-dietextension-serveroom.ru !!!
DCs are not moving into strange places. It's just that people are starting to realize that _any_ large and reasonably well-built structure is suitable as a DC. Electric power is usually a given, AC can almost always be installed and then you are down to "is it cheaper to get (redundant) fiber to this old structure or to build a new DC".
That's the beauty of a DC. The computers in there don't care where they are.
Yes it's interesting, maybe not obvious, but thinking about it this are not strange places but actually quite logical places to build your data centre. The only one that sounds strange to me is the shopping mall one. Space in shopping malls tends to be pretty expensive.
I use to live there. That that particular area is depressed. Nice thing about that location aside from the easy access is it makes it easier to service the other surrounding businesses. Empty warehouses are another datacenter location.
The only strange location would be Taco's bedroom. :)
Are you suggesting I relocate my data center to a pair of Air Jordan shoes? I think that'd be getting off on the wrong foot.
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Used to work for a "very large worldwide telecom" company that has a badly placed data center:
- hurricane zone
- flood plane
- end of an international airport runway
The good news is that data center is not used for any internal applications anymore.
The bad news is web hosting is provided there - of course, they charge premium rates since they are "the name."
The same company has another actively used data center over a public parking garage. It is used for both internal and external applications. I took the tour of that facility and as the manager talked about state of the art security, generators, networking, power from multiple substations and fuel priority just behind the local trauma center ... all I could think of was the parking garage and a packed van destroying all the servers.
To be fair, the new company purchased another company to get these assets.
Proof that politics is more important than intelligence. Data center engineers need to have larger balls and be part of the location decisions BEFORE they are made.
Per the article, the walls are 8 inches thick, not 18 as the article summary suggests.
I think the real story here is "previous IT manager was a major failure; ignored technology for 10 years." I didn't see anything truly innovative about what DiGioia did. I guess what also must be newsworthy is getting a city to part with that much money for that big of an overhaul. That's the real accomplishment.
I suppose in a hundred years or so, the LHC will make a great datacenter :)
Water tanks have interesting radiological properties. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2008/03/lux-lucis-tepida.html They are above ground source radiation and shielded by air and the bottom of a water tank is pretty well shielded from cosmic rays which might help with data integrity.
I've often wondered why anyone would bother building a data center in a warm place like Florida. You double your power bill - paying once to use the power, and again to air condition the resulting heat away.
Put the same equipment up north, and for much of the year you just have to open a window. Or, duct the waste heat over to an adjacent facility occupied by humans who will pay to use the hot air.
No hurricanes to worry about, either.
Optical media is water resistant. You just dry it off and perhaps buff off any water spots. Try doing that with tape.
speak for yourself.
My first thought is Multivac.
I realize that Multivac was just underground, but this seems like a good place to start.
coffee | nose > keyboard