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22 Stories nderground: Iron Mountain's Experimental Room 48
Down a road that winds through the rolling hills of western
Cars entering the compound are channeled into gated lanes before being searched by a guard. A short distance beyond the security point, the road disappears into a gaping hole in a cliff face. The hole is sealed off by the thick, steel bars of a tall sliding gate controlled by guards carrying semiautomatic pistols. They are protecting a 25-foot-high passage that leads 22 stories down to
Among dozens of red steel doors inserted in the rock face along corridors that create an elaborate subterranean honeycomb, you'll find Room 48, an experiment in data center energy efficiency. Open for just six months, the room is used by
Room 48 is also being used to devise a geothermal-based environment that can be tapped to create efficient, low-cost data centers. (For information on more companies using geothermal conditions to improve data center efficiency, see "Riding the geothermal wave.")
There is no raised floor in Room 48. Instead, networking wires are suspended above rows of server racks and cooled both by the limestone walls and vents attached to ceiling-mounted red spiral ducts 36 inches in diameter. The HVAC system uses the cool water of an underground lake hundreds of acres in size.
Outside light is beamed into the main aisle of the room through a long ceiling tube to reduce heat. Rows of server racks are encased in rectangular metal containers that trap electrical heat and force it up through perforated ceiling tiles, allowing the 55-degree limestone roof to absorb heat that otherwise would build up in the 4,100-square-foot room.
"Limestone can absorb 1.5 BTUs per square foot," Charles Doughty, the vice president of engineering at
Doughty's underground office is adorned with dark wood furniture that's upholstered in the type of rich leather befitting his executive status. The furniture and carpeted floors contrast sharply with a rough-hewn wall of prehistoric rock. The office sits just off a larger room filled with cubicles that also butt up against rock walls, which are painted white to better reflect light and suppress any limestone dust.
The Underground, as the mine is called by employees, has its own cafe and a fire department with three engines. Like the other 2,700 workers here, Doughty traverses miles of roadways and tunnels in golf carts.
An endurance kayaker who owns a working 30-acre farm and is training for an iron-man competition, Doughty is an idea man in a subterranean environment. He calls it "the best job in the world. I only get to create ideas. Other people do the work to make it happen. "
Four hundred million years ago, a teeming ocean covered this area. And during a 100-million-year period, billions of tiny crustaceans died, their skeletons settling to the ocean floor, fossilizing and creating layer upon layer of limestone.
In 1902, U.S. Steel began blasting out that limestone for use in the production of metal for skyscrapers, railways and the rest of the nation's booming infrastructure. By 1950, U.S. Steel ceased mining operations and began using the man-made caverns to protect its corporate records from the Cold War-era threat of atomic bombs. The company quickly saw a business opportunity in renting out mine space to other companies and to the
More than four decades later, in 1998, it was bought by Iron Mountain, which had itself started under similar circumstances in an iron ore mine in upstate New York. There, in 1951, Herman Knaust opened the Iron Mountain Atomic Storage Corp.
From Computerworld
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