Data centers go underground: A bunker mentality can be helpful for security, backup and business continuity
As Hurricane Ike bore down on Houston one Friday last September, the Continental Airlines’ flight operations center, located on the 14th floor of a glass-sided downtown high rise, suddenly went dark. For the airline’s pilots and flight crews, however, business proceeded as usual.
Here’s why: At that same moment, 42 miles north of the city and some 60 feet underground — in a hardened Cold-War era bunker built by a paranoid millionaire oilman to survive a nuclear holocaust — Continental’s backup data center took over.
Locating a backup data center in an underground bunker may seem like overkill, even in a hurricane zone. But the facility met all of the airline’s requirements — including cost, says John Stelly, managing director of technology at Continental. The bunker, run by real estate partnership Montgomery Westland, has been converted into 33,000 square feet of rack-ready data center space complete with air conditioning, redundant network and power sources, uninterruptible power supply systems and backup generators.
See Data centers go underground: A bunker mentality can be helpful for security, backup and business continuity, by Robert L. Mitchell, Computerworld.
This Comparison chart of Underground data centers provides details on some vendor offerings.
Tags: data center, Disaster Recovery, underground
