Futuristic Data Bunker in Sweden

This data center was built in a former underground nuclear bunker in Stockholm, Sweden.

Today Pingdom provides a glimpse inside an amazing new data bunker in Sweden run by Bahnhof, a large ISP.  It’s based in a former nuclear bunker below Stockholm, with 16-inch thick blast doors.

“This underground data center has greenhouses, waterfalls, German submarine engines, simulated daylight and can withstand a hit from a hydrogen bomb,” Pingdom notes. “It looks like the secret HQ of a James Bond villain.”

This is one of the most visually striking data centers I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure about all the fog and waterfalls, which I gather are separate from the equipment area. There’s also a 2,600-liter salt water fish tank.

Sun Rolls Out Data Center Design Services

Sun Microsystems (JAVA) has joined the growing crowd of companies providing data center design services to help companies improve the energy efficiency of their facilities. Sun today launched consulting services to help customers retrofit existing data centers and design new ones.

Sun is offering the consolidation of its own data center network into a state-of-the-art facility on its Santa Clara campus as a template for the process, which also may feature the use its Sun MD (Blackbox) data center container as a rapid expansion strategy for companies that have run out of space.

Sun is entering a field that has been a key focus for rivals IBM and HP, as well as many established specialists in mission-critical engineering. Data center design/build services have been a central thrust of IBM’s Project Big Green,  which has seen IBM build more than 40 customer data centers around the world. Energy-efficient design was also a driver in HP’s acquisition of EYP Mission Critical Facilities last November.

What Color is Your Cabinet?

Is white the new black in the data center? It is at Cisco Systems’ new data center in Richardson, Texas, which the company has outfitted with its latest Data Center 3.0 technology. The facility’s design focuses on energy savings, including lower voltage lighting inside the data center, and a decision on cabinets.

“We chose white cabinets, rather than gray, so more light would be reflected from them,” Andy Broer, IT manager of data center infrastructure at Cisco, says in a profile of the new data center at Cisco.com. It’s not alone, as 1&1’s recent data center in Lenexa, Kansas also sports some white cabinets. Sun Microsystems’ Project Blackbox container often is delivered in a white container, rather than the black unit with green logo that Sun showcased on a publicity tour.

Does this mean the end of the “Darth Vader data center,” with rows of black racks and cabinets populated with black servers? Many rack and cabinet vendors offer color options, with white and blue typically being the most common. Is there something timeless about those black racks that appeals to our inner data center geek? Will racks and cabinets shift over to more reflective colors to save watts on lighting? Or is all this ”green data center” talk making us daft? What color are your cabinets?

Jobs: Data Center Design and Construction

At the Data Center Jobs Board, we have a new job listing from Critical Facility Search Partners, which is seeking a Data Center Design and Construction Management professionals, both across the U.S. and internationally. Critical Facility Search Partners represents organizations involved with the design, construction, and management of critical facilities. It has positions available for Program Managers, Copnstruction Project Executives, Design Managers and more. Click here to learn more and apply.

Are you hiring for your data center? You can list your company’s job openings on the Data Center Jobs Board, and also track new openings via our RSS feed.

The Industrialization of Data Centers

When it comes to data center design, the form factor has been getting smaller. The wide-open “barn” layouts of the dot-com boom have yielded to smaller pod architectures, while some vendors and end-users are now optimizing designs around shipping containers.

The focus on smaller spaces provides greater flexibility, but also allows data center builders to standardize many elements of the process, enabling an “industrialization” of data center design. That term has been adopted recently by the world’s two largest data center operators - Digital Realty Trust and IBM.

“We’re really seeing the standardization really resonating with a lot of customers,” said Jody Cefola, Site and Facilities Services marketing Manager for IBM. “We liken it to what’s happened in IT, where companies have gone to standardized operating environments in their software.

“You want the data centers to be designed and operated so that you know you’ll have a similar environment in your data centers in different places,” said Cefola. “It becomes less complex because you’re using the same standard operating environment. It’s much easier than if everything is one-off. We’re seeing the desire to adapt to change and to the global environment.”

The trend has been driven in part by the need to conserve capital by building large footprints in phases, while compartmentalizing space to support different power and cooling loads, and in some cases offer dedicated power infrastructure to customers in multi-tenant facilities.

But standardization also offers enormous advantages to data center builders, allowing designers to develop repeatable approaches to many elements of the construction process.

Data Center Flooded at Colts’ New Stadium

Drainpipe failures at Lucas Oil Stadium have flooded the data center at the new $750 million facility, which is scheduled to host the preseason home opener for the Indianapolis Colts on Aug. 24. The problems occurred Tuesday night when a series of strong thunderstorms swept through Indianapolis. Three drainpipes designed to handle runoff didn’t work properly, flooding the data center at the stadium with several feet of water.

John Klipsch, executive director of the Indiana Stadium and Convention Building Authority, described the damage:

“The data center is the main control room for our phones, our Wi-Fi, our Internet access and some other high-tech stuff,” Klipsch said. “We called an emergency meeting with all our contractors this morning, and everybody at this juncture is reporting that they think they can get that nerve center back on line within a matter of weeks.”

Local officials say a grand opening for the new stadium Aug. 16 will go on as scheduled.

Two New Projects for Fortress International

Data center design/build specialist Fortress International Group (FIGI) announced two new projects Monday:

• A contract to complete the upgrade of existing laboratory facility to data center ready space for the University of Chicago. The project includes adding and upgrading existing electrical and mechanical infrastructure systems, as well as general construction work to secure the facility. The work is valued at $2.8 million, and is expected to be completed by the end of 2008. Fortress said its Chicago-area subsidiary, SMLB, was “instrumental in securing the project.”
• A design/build project to expand the data center for a “large information-based, data corporation” that is slated to begin immediately and be completed in early 2009. The project is for an existing customer, and is expected to generate revenues in excess of $10 million.

Fortress International is a holding company that has acquired a number of companies that design and build mission-critical facilities, most notably Total Site Solutions (TSS), which it acquired in early 2007. Other subsidiaries include Innovative Power, Rubicon, SMLB and Vortech.

How Digg Optimizes for Huge Traffic

How does the social media site Digg manage more than 26 million visitors a month? Site administrator Ron Gorodetzky talks to System Management News about the architecture Digg uses on its web site, with a focus on database management techniques. An excerpt:

“The first pain point we hit was just database stuff. The first thing you’ll notice is when you start to grow these queries, the database can’t commit as much time to committing a certain query as it used to,” said Gorodetzky. “You’ll find the normal things that work, suddenly don’t. You’ll find that, one day, you’ll see a spike in your graphs telling you that something’s going slower. Once you do that, you get to the point where the database part is as fast as it can be, you cache things. You scale out your Web server so you have more resources there, generally caching and doing less work per request.”

Gorodetzky also talks about the challenges involved with image serving, especially the expanded use of thumbnails. The site runs on a LAMP stack (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP).

You can track what we’re up to at Digg here. If you’re interested in data center and cloud computing news, add us to your friend list. Also, if you haven’t yet seen System Management News, it’s definitely a read. One of its columnists is John Rath, who many of you may know from his Data Center Links blog.

Keynote Recap from Uptime Symposium

Dave Ohara from the Green Data Center Blog has a summary of the opening keynote from the Uptime Institute Symposium 2008 in Orlando, which got underway Sunday and will continue through Wednesday. The theme is Green Enterprise Computing and the opening keynote speaker was Mike Manos from Microsoft, who was also the keynote at Data Center World earlier this month.

UPDATE: Deborah Grove from Green IT also blogged the Manos keynote. Some factoids: Microsoft data centers gain a net 20,000 new systems every month, said Manos, who also noted that data center construction costs rise 10 percent every year.

Multi-Core Adds Complexity to Data Center

The technology industry’s shift to multi-core chips has elevated the importance of parallel processing, a trend which has broad implications for how data center operators and customers pay for hardware and code their applications. As IT departments are focused on improving data center efficiency, the shift to multi-core processors is introducing a new layer of complexity, and many companies say they are not adequately prepared for the change in the marketplace.

That change is happening fast. The number of cores on new processor models is expected to double every 18 months, according to Carl Claunch, an analyst with Gartner, who said that trend is likely to hold true through at least 2015. Speaking at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas, Claunch said that performance gains now are focused not in the processor speed but in parallel processing, and software applications must change to be able to take full advantage of each additional core.