Inside the Cold War bunker that’s now a cloud datacentre
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ntHow many datacentres greet visitors with the empty sockets of twin machine gun ports, shown here?
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ntThe site’s military origins also explain why DK2 is practically invisible to motorists leaving the Swiss town of Altdorf, the place where Wilhelm Tell is supposed to have shot the apple from his son’s head.
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ntWith the end of the Cold War and the thawing political climate, l’Armu00e9e suisse decided it could manage with a smaller and more economic command-and-control centre and sold off the bunker to Radix Technologies’ sister company, Deltalis, in 2007.
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ntDeltalis is the D in the site’s DK2 name – Deltalis Kaverne Zwei. DK1 is in the French part of Switzerland and is not used as a datacentre.
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ntIn fact the bunker predates the Cold War. According to Grouitch, it was used as an underground factory making Willys-Overland Motors Jeep parts in the aftermath to WWII.
ntDK2, which consists of three caverns circled and criss-crossed by technical corridors and access tunnels, shown here, was acquired by Deltalis outright for an undisclosed price.
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ntThe date of the bunker’s decommissioning as a military facility “is not communicated for obvious security reasons”, Grouitch said.
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ntTwo of the three caverns contain three-storey brick buildings built inside the mountain’s concrete-lined rock shell. The third cavern building has two storeys, one of which had been built double height to accommodate the Swiss air force’s former datacentre – the first in Switzerland – and the large boards and screens used for tracking aircraft movements.
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ntGrouitch said l’Armu00e9e suisse is very careful about the disposal of these types of facility and takes a keen interest in their eventual use. Cloud datacentres are acceptable but James Bond villains apparently need not apply.
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nt”If you’re Mr X, or you want to do some hidden activities or drugs – they just want to make sure the former military infrastructure is not misused,” Grouitch said.
ntThe bunker has not been stripped of all its former military paraphernalia. Apart from fully equipped army kitchens and cold rooms, the map room and control console in the second cavern is still intact and functional, as shown here.
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ntAt the press of a button on the console, the large-scale maps still move up and down. They would have been updated with plots of troop movements and dispositions in this room, and then moved upstairs to the waiting generals and military strategists.
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ntAt the left at the far end of the control room is what must have been a signals centre that still contains a full-size Faraday cage cubicle for secure transmissions.
ntThe plots showing troop strengths and dispositions are still on the large map of Switzerland, a reminder of the control room’s final war game or military manoeuvre.
ntThis is a 30-tonne steel door that seals off the bunker from its second entrance.
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ntThe chamber immediately in front of this door is particularly high and wide so that once the shock wave from a nuclear explosion had travelled down the access tunnel it could dissipate before striking the bunker’s internal wall.
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ntAfter the datacentre had been designed by Alltech of Zurich and Geneva, the second entrance was used to bring in building materials and equipment, along with the technology itself.
ntThe DK2 datacentre site’s second entrance is built into the sheer mountain side.
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ntIt opens into the access tunnel leading to the decompression chamber and the massive steel door. It is tall and wide enough for a truck to drive into, which has proved useful for the building work involved in the nuclear installation’s transformation from Cold War bunker into a modern datacentre.
ntThis is the old air force control room that once contained Switzerland’s first datacentre, which was finally taken out of service about 10 years ago. The framework on the wall held radar screens and the boards used for plotting aircraft movement.
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ntThe adjoining room was where the technical support teams allocated to each aircraft worked.
ntRadix Technologies started operations in its datacentre last year, and the first of more than 25 customers started using the facility just over 12 months ago.
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ntThe customers come from all over Europe and are mainly large corporations. “The finance sector is very interested indeed,” according to Grouitch, seen here in one of the main tunnels.
ntThis is one of the two tanks used to contain water for cooling the site. The tanks are situated one behind the other with one containing up to 480 cubic metres of water, and the other 380 cubic metres.
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ntWhen the datacentre is at full capacity and takes up the full half cavern, the water will only be used for cooling the backup generators. But at the moment, the water is used in the cooling of the datacentre itself.
ntThis photo shows how the bunker’s inner buildings were constructed. The brick skin of the three-storey building on the left is separated by an air space from the concrete-lined cavern wall on the right.
ntThe datacentre itself occupies only a fraction of the 15,000 square-metre site. At 100 square metres, it contains about 51 racks and about 125 physical severs cooled by cold-aisle technology.
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ntA further 400 square metres could be ready within a month and once the full facility is operational – involving all three caverns – as many as 6,000 racks could be in use by other customers.
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ntThe power-usage effectiveness rating for the datacentre is 1.2 and the whole facility is designed to have a PUE of between 1.1 and 1.3.
ntPower supply to the facility is 1MW but is shortly to be upgraded to 4MW, with 12MW available by 2013.
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ntThe Radix Technologies datacentre gets its main power from the public grid. The company is also installing a second line from the grid in a different area of Switzerland to offer redundancy in the case of a failure.
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ntBeyond that point are two further electricity networks powered by diesel generators and battery-backed uninterruptible power supplies.
ntThis is the diesel generator for the B power network, which would cut in in the case of failure of both the lines from the public grid and the A network backup.
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ntThe generators are tested every month.
ntThe fire-resistant, double-skinned diesel tanks for the datacentre’s two back-up power generators have been installed in two rooms that used to form part of the old mess where military personnel would eat.
ntThe room containing Radix Technologies uninterruptible power supplies, which would be called into service as soon as the main supply was lost.
These batteries are connected to the uninterruptible power supplies and are designed to provide the cover in the 20 to 40 seconds before the diesel generators kick in.
