Data centres go underground

Security, backup, data recovery and business continuity in a bunker

As Hurricane Ike bore down on Houston one Friday last September, the Continental Airlines' flight operations centre, 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 centre took over. Throughout the ordeal - from Friday morning, as the storm approached, through Saturday, when winds above the Westland Bunker in Montgomery, Texas, gusted to 125 miles per hour, until Sunday evening, when operations resumed in Houston - the airline managed an 89 percent on time rating for its global flight schedule.

Locating a backup data centre 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 centre space complete with air conditioning, redundant network and power sources, uninterruptible power supply systems and backup generators.

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Source: features.techworld.com
By: Robert L. Mitchell