Presentation Title: Taking the Cloud Underground. Towards a safer, greener and more resilient data center. Notes from the field.

Short Description of Proposed Session: Is Mother Nature the ultimate data center design / build guru? By refitting and (re)integrating existing, yet underutilized, Cold War era government continuity facilities with its natural surroundings and resources, an Atlantic Canadian collocation and hosted services startup believes it can build a better, safer, greener and more resilient data center - averting potential disaster by taking the Cloud literally underground. From harnessing the energy of the wind and tides, to utilizing a large underground lake for geothermal cooling, the challenges, possibilities and potential offered by the natural landscape are explored through recent real-life experiences and conceptual visions for a 21st century sustainable data center model.

Presentation Outline:

Summary of topic(s) covered: As data centers continue to shift to increased reliance on “green”, renewable sources of energy, the end result is often anything but sustainable. Focusing on intermittent energy sources (e.g. power generated from the sun and wind), while ignoring the contextual qualities of location, data center energy strategies – as huge consumers of energy - can often work against, rather than with the existing or potential energy capabilities of the region. While data is not constrained by territory, data centers exist within a physical landscape of varying energy capacity.

Dataville, a cluster of data centers located in Nova Scotia, is well-positioned in the search for alternative and integrative energy strategies. There are numerous domestic sources available that can be used to help make its data centers secure and sustainable, including biomass, geothermal, hydroelectric, solar, tidal and wind. In addition, the energy efficiency of the process can be significantly improved by tapping groundwater for cooling, and recovering and reusing of water and heat for use in the data center or for auxiliary industrial and agricultural uses.

Relying on energy generating and energy saving processes and exploiting existing and underutilized infrastructure, data centers can be built in a manner that works with existing resources rather than against them. In this manner, Dataville is aiming to build both stability and security in relation to energy, and in turn, to data storage, disaster planning and recovery in times of crisis, by specifically reacting and responding to the existing landscape.

This presentation intends to offer an update to a presentation made during a 2008 7x24 Exchange conference. Presenters will share their experiences and lessons learned over the past two years during the development, build and inauguration of Dataville, determined to turn 'green' ideas and theoretical concepts into reality.

Presentation method:

The proposed presentation will be highly visually-oriented and consist of both real and conceptual images and diagrams that support a narrative of first-hand experience as they relate to the presentation topic.

Primary Presenter Biography: Bastionhost's founder and principal architect, Anton E. Self, is turning Cold War era military surplus buildings into Dataville: a system of green, efficient, low-cost 21st century world-class data centers and storage silos to serve North America and Europe from Atlantic Canada.

Mr. Self studied Corporate Finance and International Portfolio Management at the London School of Economics, and Humanities at the University of Arizona. Mr. Self learned his craft in broadband applications infrastructure in the telecom growth era of the ‘90s at Metropolitan Fiber Systems and MCI Communications. Previously Mr. Self founded and managed Telephant, a data communications infrastructure company based in New York, where he dug up miles of city streets between Wall St. and Midtown, laid conduits of optical fiber, and sold network services to major enterprises and government.

Co-Presenter Biography: Scott Good applies his technical expertise and extensive project experience to Bastionhost’s mission critical data center and communications infrastructure projects. Dedicating his professional career to the data center industry, he has developed millions of square feet of Data Center infrastructure with a constant focus on best metrics and cost for his clients.

A graduate of Rutgers University with majors in Communications and Electrical Engineering, he is an active member of the Uptime Institute, AFCOM, 24x7 Exchange, and BICSI.