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."

Comments

Re:And it's great for sysadmins

[bysin]

You just dive in and swim to the server racks.

There's a new job opening in Altamonte, a sysadmin that is SCUBA certified.

"Tapes are unreliable"

[BaldingByMicrosoft]

"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.

Re:"Tapes are unreliable"

[afidel]

Agreed, another clueless soul bitten by AIT/DAT/DDS/QIC who will never understand real archival tape. If the data is worth anything (and government records are) then pony up a little bit of cash for a real tape solution. It might be as expensive as one or two of your servers but it's so worth it to actually have your data when you need it.

Take 10inches off those walls

[enoz]

Summary is inaccurate (as usual):

TFS: 18-inch walls
TFA: 8-inch walls