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A Data Center That Looks Like a Mansion
1sockchuck writes "A luxury homebuilder in Minnesota wants to build a data center that looks like a mansion, allowing the commercial building to fit into a residential neighborhood. The 'community-based data center' designed for FiberPop features a stone facade and sloped roof with dormers, along with an underground data hall."
But for crystal meth.
Easier for the techs to get pizza delivery.
It seems like some of the most expensive land you can buy, so I'm not sure why they'd want to use it for a data center, which can be built pretty much anywhere (and which is generally not staffed by mansion-dwellers)
In particular, will the neighbors enjoy the continuous howling of the AC fans?
That and the dual 1 megawatt diesel generators, which are test run once a week for an hour during 3rd shift, mostly to keep 3rd shift awake... They're a little bit quieter than a locomotive at full throttle, but not much.
Another important point is this is only a couple hundred miles from my home, and unless things are wildly different there than here, the "urban skyscraper area", hospital, police dept, etc are snowplowed out every 30 minutes during storms, but residential? Eh, maybe an hour or two after the storm ends, they'll think of plowing it out. So they have no access in or out of the building during a snow storm. Whoops.
Finally all the DCs I've worked with/at had underground feeders. No big deal in the urban area or farmland, but in McMansion-ville you're going to seriously annoy the neighbors constantly digging up their rosebushes.
Of course, they are probably not installing a "real" data center, because a FTTH provider does not require one, my guess is they're probably installing a single rack (or less) of gear as part of some tax or zoning or building code dodge. Maybe zoning doesn't allow a sales office, tech center, or warehouse, but they Really Want one, so they'll install a "data center" instead which happens to coincidentally have a sales dept, warehouse. tech dispatch center, etc, located in the same building.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I'm building a mansion that looks like a data center.
Have gnu, will travel.
You just nweed to type dcarefullyand reiveiw.
I saw a similar move a few years ago where the builder tried to force approval of a mobile home park with a "corrective amendment" in a township that required a 2 acre minimum lot size because he really wanted to put up tract homes and a small sewage treatment plant that nobody trusted would be operated correctly. That attempt failed because the township didn't exclude mobile homes (there were actually a fair number of mobile homes in the largely rural township where the 2 acre minimum was needed for proper on-site septic systems). But it was a long and expensive fight.
A few points:
1) You say you live a couple hundred miles away from Minnetonka. That places you exactly no where that is even slightly resemblent of this area so I wouldn't use your personal local experience as a good reference.
2) The suburbs around the Twin Cities (especially the rich ones like Minnetonka) are plowed significantly better than the core. Faster, better plowing/QOS. We haven't had much snow this year at all but last year when we were buried the cores basically shut down because they had no where to put the snow and because the urban street parking gets in the way of fully clearing the roads. Also, this being a large enough private parcel, they will have no problem getting their property cleared privately for much less cost than you might think (especially if they find some cost effective way to use the plowed snow for cooling)
3) This is not being built in the middle of a bunch of McMansions... this is former, not yet developed, farm land (Minnetonka's about as close to the downtowns as you can get and still find that). A large part of Minnetonka is not the extremely expensive lake-living property. The real estate market is also terrible still (although recovering a bit) so the previous plans to develop this land probably fell apart. No one is financing new subdivisions because they can't sell the properties they've already built. This is a developer who had already purchased the land finding a new way to make use of it. Noise and traffic are not non-issues but when the developer owns all the land surrounding the place he can control a lot about who cares. TFA mentions the reduced density the land will have probably including significant distancing to reduce sound issues.
4) Although there is some merit to the scams theories popping up, they really are close to their target audience. Aside from the FTTH service that would probably be a small part of the new business, The outer tier suburbs have really exploded in terms of tech offices. We have a larger technical base out-city, especially around Minnetonka/Excelcior/Eden Prairie, than downtown has. The money out there is HUGE and they are being smart finding themselves close to their customers corporate AND residential.
Just sayin...