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Former NATO Nuclear Bunker Now an 'Airless' Unmanned Data Center

Posted by timothy on from the no-humans-involved dept.

An anonymous reader writes A German company has converted a 1960s nuclear bunker 100 miles from network hub Frankfurt into a state-of-the-art underground data center with very few operators and very little oxygen. IT Vision Technology (ITVT) CEO Jochen Klipfel says: 'We developed a solution that reduces the oxygen content in the air, so that even matches go outIt took us two years'. ITVT have the European Air Force among its customers, so security is an even higher priority than in the average DC build; the refurbished bunker has walls 11 feet thick and the central complex is buried twenty feet under the earth.

3 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. How is maintenance performed? by Isarian · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Do staff go down with O2 tanks for maintenance, cleaning, server work, etc?

    1. Re:How is maintenance performed? by wierd_w · · Score: 5, Interesting

      This may or may not be a serious problem, depending on how they designed the data center.

      Because it is heavier than air (REALLY heavier than air-- you can float a tinfoil boat on it!), all you need to do to evacuate it is add pressurized normal air above it, and have an openable floor drain reservoir to allow the displaced sulfur hexafluoride to exit through. The normal air will displace the gas.

      Additionally, the heaviness of the gas will cause it to stay pooled in the datacenter, meaning you wont have to keep adding gas to the datacenter as often to maintain the low O2 environment.

      Additionally, it is "safe" to breathe sulfur hexafluoride. (About as safe as huffing helium)-- it just displaces the oxygen. it does not itself cause any choking or inhalation hazard other than asphyxiation from low O2. It makes your voice very deep sounding.

      If done right, "draining" the gas could be an extremely cost effective solution. (When done, open the vents at the top of the datacenter, then just pump the gas back into the room from the reservoir under the floor.)

      So, it being heavier than air may or may not be a problem, depending on how they designed the system.

    2. Re:How is maintenance performed? by wierd_w · · Score: 3, Interesting

      S-F6 is 6x heavier than normal air.

      Pure nitrogen is not anywhere near that level of disparity. Also, pure nitrogen does not have the same electrical insulation properties. You could put a tesla coil in a S-F6 atmosphere, and it would not discharge until a VERY significant voltage had been achieved.

      This means that even if an electrical failure occurs in the datacenter, sparking would not be a source of secondary ignition.

      Pure nitrogen would also be harder to determine when the atmosphere in the datacenter was safe for human respiration. With the S-F6, if you inhale it, it makes you sound like a steroid pusher. You could immediately tell if the atmosphere had not been vented, long before you became woozy and light headed from O2 deprivation.