22 Stories Underground: Iron Mountain’s Experimental Room 48
December 9th, 2009Definitely DO NOT miss the image gallery that goes along with this story.
Via: Computerworld:
Down a road that winds through the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania, just across from a cow pasture, the bucolic scenery of Butler County is interrupted by a high chain-link fence topped with razor wire.
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 Iron Mountain’s main archive facility, which takes up 145 acres of a 1,000-acre abandoned limestone mine.
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 Iron Mountain to discover the best way to use geothermal conditions and engineering designs to establish the perfect environment for electronic documents.
Room 48 is also being used to devise a geothermal-based environment that can be tapped to create efficient, low-cost data centers.
Mmmm, imagine what the black world looks like…
http://www.freedomfiles.org/headlines/pictures/AirForceTBM_2.jpg
I remember that level from HalfLife.