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AS OF 8/20/2008 9:10AM EST

Underground Data Centers Help Cut Costs
By Jeff Feinman

July 15, 2008 — Organizations and data center managers are escaping the growing utility costs that are piling up around them by grabbing a shovel and setting up facilities underground.

A disconcerting yet well-known fact about data centers is that up to 60 percent of power is being used on non-IT related activities, like cooling. But data centers below the soil are offering novel methods to cool the equipment and save money all the same.

Underground data center StrataSpace was set up in 2005. StrataSpace was designed as a 570,000-square-foot facility and is 60 feet underground. It was carved out of limestone, which provides security and HVAC efficiency that cannot be achieved in an above-ground structure, according to StrataSpace executives.

The facility is just northeast of Louisville, Kentucky, which has some of the lowest power rates in America. According to the Energy Information Administration, Kentucky has an average retail price of electricity of 5.01 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh). The low utility rates in Kentucky and the HVAC efficiencies in StrataSpace result in significantly reduced operating costs compared to above-ground data centers located in other parts of the country.

StrataSpace consists of underground buildings that can be built to an organization’s design specifications, offering operations with redundant power, fibre, ventilation and HVAC systems. Organizations can determine the layout and security of the center.

Sun Microsystems is also digging deep, as it is developing a data center in an abandoned coal mine in Japan, which will use up to 50 percent less power than a ground-level data center and save US$9 million annually in electricity, the company said.

Sun will apparently lower Blackbox systems into the ground, which Sun calls the world’s first “virtualized data center.” Blackbox shipping containers are 20 feet long and are deployable in a tenth of the time it takes to build and deploy a traditional data center.

Project Blackbox can hold 250 Sun Fire servers configured for grid computing across seven racks inside the container, according to the company. An eighth rack contains network switches, a dehumidifier, thermal management systems and alarm controls. Sun also said that it can handle up to 10,000 simultaneous desktop users. It can use up to 7 terabytes of memory and more than 2 petabytes of storage.

It is believed that the underground data center being developed in Japan will use 30 Blackboxes. The facility will be cooled by ground water, with the site’s temperature remaining at 15 degrees Celsius all year. As a result, there won’t be a need for air conditioning outside the Blackbox containers, which will save a great amount of expenses in energy usage. The coal mine where the data center is being developed is located in the Chibu region of Japan’s Honshu island. The project has been estimated to cost $405 million, and Sun executives predict that the site will offer data center services to the public in April 2010.

Even the hotel business has gotten involved in the underground data center, as Marriot Hotels is developing an underground data recovery and development center in a naturally cooled mine 220 feet underground. The new facility, when completed, will give Marriot disaster recovery operations, testing and quality assurance, and a data center for business growth. As of this writing, Marriot could not provide further details on the site.

Related Search Term(s): Data centers, HVAC, power, StrataSpace, Sun

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