DATA CENTRE DESIGN
Seven of the most astonishing data
By Comtec
centre installations taking design
www.comtec.com
principles to the extreme…
300 meters below the ground
In a converted mineshaft in the Norwegian
archipelago of Svalbard, Norway’s famous doomsday seed
vault is getting a new neighbour. It’s called the Arctic World
Archive, and it aims to do for data what the Svalbard Global
Seed Vault has done for crop samples – provide a remote,
impregnable home in the Arctic permafrost, safe from
threats such as natural disasters and global conflicts.
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In the middle of the desert
The Utah Data Centre, also known as the Intelligence
Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative
Data Centre, is a data storage facility for the United States
Intelligence Community designed to store data estimated
to be on the order of exabytes or larger. Its purpose is to
support the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative
(CNCI), though its precise mission is classified.
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In an Ice Cube Lab
Minus 40 degrees… So cold, they have to heat the air
used to cool the data centre. The Ice Cube Lab data centre
has over 1,200 computing cores, three petabytes of storage
and is tethered to the Ice Cube Observatory; a neutrino
detector with strings of optical sensors buried a kilometre
deep in the Antarctic ice.
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In a beautiful church
The Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) installed
its MareNostrum, is the most powerful supercomputer in
Europe, and can be found in the 19th century Torre Girona
chapel in Barcelona, Spain.
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Inside a chicken coop
3 Yahoo is committed to being an environmentally
responsible company, and the addition of a G-O2 Living
Wall is just one leafy example. With the Internet accessible
by over 40% of the world’s population, such a demand
for Internet services requires expanded infrastructure and
installation of more computing and data storage capability
with low power consumption. Completed in 2015, Yahoo’s
newest data centre is a 155,000 square foot facility in
Lockport, New York, and uses 40% less energy and 95%
less water than conventional facilities. The air-cooled data
centre, which can accommodate 50,000 servers, is based on
an unlikely design: the chicken coop.
Hidden inside a mountain
Green Mountain is the world’s most environmentally
friendly data centre. The data centre in Stavanger, Norway
uses hydroelectric power, and water-cooling, and is built into
an old, recycled Nato hideaway. The owner Smedvig claims
the 22,000 square metre data centre has the world’s lowest
Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating and a practically
non-existent carbon footprint.
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At the bottom of the ocean
Called Project Natick, the 2015 experiment involved
housing a data centre inside a watertight 17,237kg
cylindrical vessel measuring approximately 3x2m. Anchored
over half a mile (0.8 km) off the US Pacific coast, the unit
used as much computing power as 300 desktop PCs.
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www.networkseuropemagazine.com
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