9 Data Centers: Unexpected Beauty And Creativity
, October 04, 2012 Most data centers are boring boxes--but not all. Take a look at a data center that houses a supercomputer in a chapel, or an underground data center with James Bond-styling, or a solar-powered data center, and much, much more.
A Pair Of Data Centers
Networking giant Cisco opened a pair of new data centers 15 miles apart in Allen, Texas, in 2011. The two sites serve as active-active mirrors of each other to ensure immediate failover in case either suffers an outage. The Metro Virtual Data Center, as Cisco calls this approach, is being adopted by the company in several other locations around the world. The centers incorporate many modern data center trends: using outside air for cooling more than half of the time, enclosed cabinets with chimneys to keep hardware exhaust air isolated from incoming chilled air, rotary UPS rather than conventional batteries, solar panels and LED lighting, and a lagoon that collects rainwater for irrigation. Image courtesy of Douglas Alger
