Swedish Nuclear Bunker Transmogrified Into Data Center Fit For Bond

Sunday, November 16, 2008

This must take the record for the trippiest data-center build anywhere, ever: It's an old nuclear bunker 30 meters below central Stockholm, and its new conversion for one of Sweden's biggest ISPs has made it truly 007-worthy. Check it: it has simulated daylight, greenhouses and waterfalls, there're German submarine engines rigged as emergency backup generators, plus there's 1.5 megawatts of cooling for the servers. Oh, and it can survive a hydrogen bomb attack.

That's 'cause it was built into the old "Pionen White Mountains" nuclear bunker from the Cold War, though they took a year to convert it, and had to blast out more than 4,000 cubic meters of extra rock to make room for Bahnhof's infrastructure. The backup engines are two Maybach MTU diesels, and they've got the submarine emergency sound horns still in place. Meanwhile the net connections even have triple redundancy, with the fiber-optic and copper trunk lines following three different routes into the bunker. That's one massively redundant data center, no doubt about it.

On the human side, the 15 staff are treated to a 2600-liter fish tank, and a circular mid-air glass-walled conference room that has a moon-map for a floor. The CEO himself has confirmed that some sci-fi movie inspiration was deliberately incorporated into the design. Craziness.

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