Iron Mountain National Data Center

Designing a data center is the process of modeling and designing a data center's IT resources, architectural layout and entire infrastructure. It enables the logical conception of a data center prior to development or implementation in an organization or IT environment. Nowadays, the growing creativity of the data center architects makes them modeling more secure, resilient, reliable, economical and sustainable infrastructures. The perfect example of this kind of exceptional data centers is the Iron Mountain National Data Center. What is so special about it?

First of all, this 145 acres data center, which was formerly a limestone mine, is located UNDERGROUND. Incredible isn’t? This data center is definitely the Holy Grail of the data centers. Why?

First, its underground location makes it impervious to natural disasters such as storms, tornados, floods or hurricanes and makes it technically quite difficult to access. This data center is also located in a zero earthquake zone. Moreover, during its construction phase, the former mine walls have been shaved and scaled, the ceiling mashed for additional stability and the floor made a stable base for the equipment. Which means in other words that it is a high level security facility.

Second, several generators pots are settled throughout the data center complex so that to prevent one single point of failure which increases the reliability of the infrastructure.

Third, the colocation facility is modeled in order to assure its resilience, and the redundancy (can be used for networking or any operational support).

Fourth, knowing that data centers are among the largest users of energy and therefore polluters on the planet, the key question that the architects of this facility asked themselves was the following: how do we reduce sustainably the operational cost of our data center? Thanks to the ambient fresh air of the underground data center (around 52°F), they are able to cool all the equipment located in the colocation area. The natural limestone walls are also helpful because limestone naturally absorbs heat. Finally, the water of the water nymph at 50°F is pumped to cool the servers by extracting the heat generated by their processing, and the warmer water is afterwards dispersed in a lake, ¼ mile far. This means that no cooling towers, no water evaporation system are needed. This data center is not only economical and green but also a user-friendly one.

WOW!

Do you agree now that the Iron Mountain National Data Center is probably the Holy Grail of the Data Centers?