Many cities have unfinished or abandoned buildings — shopping centers, old exchanges, train stations, and even churches. Not all of them are ideal for housing data centers, but many of them can indeed be given a second life as one.
It is often a laborious and expensive endeavor to buy a new piece of real estate for the construction of a data center in a large city, all of which is further complicated by a lack of communications infrastructure and the mass of red tape; however, many old buildings already have all of the necessary infrastructure and are quite inexpensive.
For the construction of a data center, the building has to be reconstructed, extra walls removed, sometimes the ceilings raised, and the foundation strengthened, but it can be well worth it if the result is a new data center connected to prime communication channels and located right in the city. Examples of these kind s of projects are plentiful:
A former church in Barcelona (Spain) was reconstructed as a data center for three super-computers (including a Mare Nostrum — the brainchild of IBM);
The abandoned Steelcase Pyramid shopping center in Michigan, rebuilt in 1989 and as a prestigious research center by Switch in 2010 it was repurposed as a modern data center;
The high-tech Pionen project in Stockholm, which was originally a nuclear bomb shelter, and now looks like the lair of a villain-technocrat out of James Bond;
The abandoned Sun-Times printing house in downtown Chicago, which in 2014 was turned into a modern data center by QTS.
As we can see, there are already quite a few projects which have repurposed old buildings as data centers, and this movement is gaining momentum because it benefits everyone — municipalities are freed of dilapidated real estate which was a drain on the budget, and data center operators get a building and land at a good price. It’s a plus for ordinary citizens as well — they rebuild the buildings, redecorate the facade, and these buildings are no longer an eyesore on the city with their run-down appearance. This trend can also satisfy the green-minded, because these projects do not occupy new land, material consumption is reduced; there are fewer CO emissions, etc.
This trend might not suit hyperscalers who take their data centers far away from residential areas, closer to a source of cheap renewable energy (usually a hydroelectric power station), but the it is definitely positive. Every year the hardware is becoming more and more compact and efficient, so these kinds of projects will be increasingly in demand when it comes to small data centers.
When choosing a cloud provider, customers primarily think about the cost of the services provided, the availability of the infrastructure and the performance of the computing system. Factors such as the hardware platform used and the quality of the data center are of much less interest to customers, but in vain.
The reliability of any data center is characterized by its TIER. Even if the data center has not received a classification officially, it still tacitly belongs to one of the tiers. The tier works much like the star system for hotel service: the higher the tier, the better and more reliable the data center.
HOSTKEY servers are all located in one of three locations — the Netherlands, the USA and Russia and they are all hosted in TIER 3 data centers
What does TIER 3 mean? That the data center can be maintained and updated without interrupting or stopping work. The same applies to the replacement, repair and upgrading of specific equipment. All these processes can be carried out without turning off the data center. Within one year, no third-tier facility loses more than 1.6 hours of uptime, and its resistance to failure in emergency situations is 99.9%.
