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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.
"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.
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
"Area Data Center Actually Located in Data Center Facility; IT Experts Confused, Baffled"
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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.