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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.
There's a new job opening in Altamonte, a sysadmin that is SCUBA certified.
...is more compute power, memory and disk than the Cray-2 I did my dissertation work on.
I'm betting that the warm fuzzies of having undeniable 24/7 access had some appeal. Plus the sense of control. A point of failure (the colo) is removed, The uncertainty of how the contract renewal is removed. And the jobs stay in town, which matters to government.
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.
"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.
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
"Area Data Center Actually Located in Data Center Facility; IT Experts Confused, Baffled"
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Mineral oil is better because it's inorganic and therefore won't go rancid.