Fiber-Mart Brings You for a Visit to the Pretty Interesting Data

Data center is a physical or virtual infrastructure used by enterprises to house computer, server and networking systems and components for the company’s information technology needs. A data center generally includes redundant or backup power supplies, redundant data communications connections, environmental controls (e.g., air conditioning, fire suppression) and various security devices.

In the last few decades, we’ve been building a variety of data centers in the world and now there are almost more than 500,000 data centers around the world. As most people’s impression like, data center is an unreachable and mystical place where contains a lot of serves and devices, secure and reliable, grand and tidy. Thus, most of the data centers are built in some remote or low temperature place. With the growth of technology advances and energy needs, data centers around the world will trend to high-tech, secure, and eco-friendly inspiration. Some interesting data centers which are with innovative designs or in weirdest locations arouses to the people’s interest. Today, Fiber-Mart will bring you for a visit to these fascinating and innovative data centers around the world.

Pionen Data Center, Sweden
Pionen Data Center lies in an underground bunker 100 feet beneath Stockholm, Sweden. This former military bunker was designed to withstand a blast from a hydrogen bomb. It’s in a good environment with the granite cave, there are greenhouses, an artificial waterfall and a 686-gallon salt-water fish tank. It has once been well known for hosting two servers of the famous site Wikileaks.

MareNostrum Center, Spain
MareNostrum is located in the the former Torre Girona Chapel on the campus of the Technical University of Catalonia. Housed in a glass room, the supercomputer sits inside the chapel, which was built in the 1920s. It predates the green data center movement, but its location within the religious setting along with the subdued lighting make for an impressive visual experience. It is one of the fastest supercomputer in the world which are made up of 10,240 IBM Power PC 970MP processors, performance of 94.21 trillion floating-point operations per-second.

Deltalis Radixcloud Data Center, Attinghausen, Switzerland
Deltalis Radixcloud Data Center is located in the mountains and tucked in the Alps. As the former command and control center for the Swiss Air Force, this data center is plenty secure, reinforced. Due to its location, it takes advantage of cool air and glacial waters to cool the facility at low cost. The data gear within the center is modular units made by Netherlands-based Minkels.

Citi Data Center, Germany
Citi Data Center is an innovative green data center which is located in Frankfurt, Germany. It features a green roof made up of living plants that help reduce runoff from the building and to keep it cool. In addition, the facility uses fresh air for cooling, reverse osmosis to reduce sediment build-up in cooling towers and thereby saving 13 million gallons of water per year and uses virtualization to reduce the number of physical servers needed. However, the green wall shown here is made up of living plants that don’t improve the efficiency of the center, but promote biodiversity at the site.

Bahnhof modular data center, Sweden
As we know, Bahnhof leases traditional data center space from a variety of locations. However, outside Kista, Sweden, it is building a modular facility made of a central, inflatable hub that can connect to three portable armored-steel rooms that house data center hardware. When it opens this spring the inflatable hub will serve as an office as well as a space for unpacking gear headed for the hardware rooms. Bahnhof says the modular nature of the facility means it does not require a huge initial investment and it can grow as demand grows.

OVH data center, Canada
The OVH Data Center is located in Canada which has remodeled a former Rio Tinto Alcan aluminum plant to fit its model of running data centers with efficient heat transfer and can hold room for 360,000 servers. It use all the hot aisles in the facility back onto a central air shaft that carries heat out the roof. Thus, this data center does not need air conditioners because it relies instead on proprietary technology it designed. In addition, hydroelectric power from a nearby generation facility provides electricity.

Yahoo Computing Coop, Lockport, NY
Yahoo Computing Coop is located in Lockport, NY. You may find it familiar at first glance. Yes, each building looks like a huge chicken coop. That’s because some of it’s design principles were adapted from chicken coops! The YCC is optimized for fresh air cooling, which they can use for the majority of the year.

Iron Mountain Data Center, Pennsylvania
The Iron Mountain Data Center in Boyers, Pennsylvania is built into an old limestone mine. It is located more than 200 feet underground, Room 48 takes advantage of its subterranean environment that the energy efficient data center that uses the mine’s limestone walls to absorb heat and eliminate the need for typical data center cooling systems.

McMurdo Station, South Pole
With the problems that data centers have with cooling, the Antarctic is perhaps the ideal site for such a facility. McMurdo Station is located in South Pole, as a scientific research center for the US. This “white snow” data center is dedicated to supporting scientific work and running the station – with 64 servers and more than 2TB of storage connected to hundreds of desktops by a gigabit Ethernet network. Though it looks poor, every day up to 100GB of science data is transferred from the station to the US via satellite-communication links in support of multiple NSF-funded science projects.

Cyberbunker, Southern Netherlands
The Cyberbunker hides in the forests of Kloetinge, Southern Netherlands. There is a four-level Cold War-era nuclear bunker made up of numerous tunnels and operations rooms. And because every data center should be protected from the outside world, there is even nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) air filtration throughout the complex.

What’s your feeling after visiting the above ten interesting and special data center? They are the achievement of people’s wisdom and efforts. And as the time goes on and the technology develops, more and more innovative and green data centers will be built all over the world. The interesting data centers mentioned in this paper just a small part of them. If you know of other data centers that are as super-designed, environment-friendly and special, please let us know. You could link the pictures and information to our Facebook Page.

Warm Tips: If you are planning to build a data center or building the infrastructure (eg. cabling) for your data center, Fiber-Mart will be the best choice for your fiber optic products requirements.