monitor it, we can operate without concern of negative
impact,” Doughty says.
The natural limestone that surrounds the subterranean
facility is another “underground” advantage — it can absorb
1. 5 BTUs per square foot per hour, which is one reason there
are no raised floors in Room 48. And when more limestone
surface area is exposed, more BTUs can be dissipated. With
the exception of separation walls and perforated ceilings,
every available square inch of limestone is exposed in Room
48. This creates a perfect balance, because in the winter the
rock is recharged with cold, which absorbs the heat in the
summer. Think of it as a natural recharging of the system.
Geothermal Cooling on the Horizon
The prospects of geothermal cooling add another comple-
mentary dimension to Room 48. “This is one of the con-
cepts we’re progressing,” Doughty declares. “With roughly
145 acres of a 1,000-acre abandoned mine, if we utilize
the water present in the mine along with the air, we could
establish virtually zero-cost cooling without chillers and
cooling towers. It’s what the industry refers to as a chill-
erless system.”
Iron Mountain uses Power Utilization Effectiveness
(PUE) to measure the impact of this technology (currently
in the design phase). Determining PUE involves taking all
the power consumed in a data center and dividing it by the
power consumed by the computer racks only. Because the
Iron Mountain facility has a PUE of 1. 7 (at many data centers
it’s 2. 5), Doughty says Iron Mountain is saving hundreds of
thousands of dollars a year. When the company develops
and implements a geothermal cooling system, he expects
the facility’s PUE will be in the range of 1. 1 to 1. 2, creating
additional ecological and economical savings.
Caught in a Cool tide: EnERgy EFFICIEn T DATA CEn TER BROUgh T TO LIFE
Marriott International Leases
Energy-efficient Underground
Data Center from Iron Mountain
Unhappy with its first-come, first-served, outsourced disaster recovery (DR) strategy, Marriott International needed
an arrangement that would provide it with the flexibility
to configure a DR system on its own terms that would
instantly react to disaster recovery situations.
When Marriott was going through the RFI/RFP process
to find such a solution, it was thinking in traditional terms:
Establish a co-location relationship with an outsourcing service provider that would guarantee complete DR coverage.
Traditional thinking gave way to innovative action when
Marriott began talking with Iron Mountain about setting
up a new Business Recovery Center in its underground
facility in Pennsylvania. After visiting the site and learning
about the benefits of the subterranean location — including green initiatives such as reducing power consumption
and providing natural heating and cooling — the company
signed the deal. Working with Iron Mountain, Marriott
designed and built the Marriott Recovery and Development
Center (RDC), a new facility that not only meets DR needs
but also serves as a second data center.
“So far things have gone exceedingly well,” declares Dan
Blanchard, vice president of enterprise operations at Marriott. “We have always had a rigorous and constant focus
on having disaster preparedness in place. We wanted more
flexibility and we got it. We have had a 100 percent success
rate in our DR testing, which gives us high confidence.” In
the event of an air chiller failure, the Marriott data center
would kick over to an emergency backup system that uses
a direct infusion of cold air from within the facility directly
into the data center to dissipate heat.
Marriott had already completed the business impact
analysis to determine Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs)
and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs). These targets and
measures of how long their business would operate without
the systems being in place to run specific business processes
and how much data can acceptably be lost when a disaster
occurs were critical to their decision.
When designing the new RDC, the company specifically chose not to change its existing RTO and RPO implementations, because the RDC is a dual-use facility for both
dedicated DR and conventional day-to-day applications. As
a result, Marriott is able to recover data more quickly than it
was in its previous arrangement.
Technically, the underground data center has been a
money-saving success story, but according to Blanchard,
what Marriott didn’t count on was what he refers to as
the “cool” factor — and he’s not referring to low tempera-
tures. “One thing that surprised us was the high amount of
interest in the project that was expressed by our technical
team,” he says. “They had a lot of interest in the coolness, the
uniqueness of putting a data center underground.”
Summing up his feelings about the RDC, Blanchard states
“We have a new energy-efficient data center, a tremendous
capability for disaster recovery, and a great partner in Iron
Mountain. The fact that it happens to be underground
makes it all the more unique.”
