Ever since coming to work at UC Santa Cruz, I have been feeling pretty lucky to work in a well engineered and managed datacenter. So lucky, in fact, that I’ve been cultivating hatred towards me in my former coworkers by regaling them with stories about how wonderfully designed everything is here. The problem with thinking you have it made though, is that someone will always point out some greener grass in another field.
This is exactly what happened when I saw this article about the Pionen datacenter, owned by Bahnhof in Sweden. Located nearly 100 feet beneath the city of Stockholm, this epic datacenter has been compared (fairly I might add) to the secret layer of a James Bond villian. It’s got backup power provided by twin submarine engines, triple-redundant internet backbone connections, and can reportedly stand up to a Hydrogen bomb. We spend so much time and effort trying to make our servers comfortable when designing datacenters, we often forget about the Human element. Even though these guys are literally working in a cave, it’s nice to see that Bahnhof is trying to make its people comfortable as well.
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Beats working in the heat! I wonder how the lack of sunlight affects their employees tho.