From sanctuary to war room

For its part, Advanced Data Centers (ADC) is using part of the old McClellan Air Force Base outside Sacramento. ADC has bought an on-base facility and is working with the local utility to make sure it has plentiful -- and economic -- power. ADC is a San Francisco-based start-up that hopes to build a business around providing energy-efficient data centers for Fortune 1,000 companies, including banks, insurance providers and retailers.

The 3,700-acre base was closed as a military site six years ago but remains an industrial and business park.

When it goes online in a bit more than a year, it will be just shy of a quarter of a million square feet, says ADC President Michael Cohen.

There are other amenities that go part and parcel with the site, including police and fire presences nearby in case of emergencies, two local power substations and room for expansion on the rest of the 3,700-acre base.

In addition, Sacramento is "not on a flood plain and is basically seismically inactive" -- important considerations in California, says Cohen.

ADC is working with Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) on the power supply aspect. SMUD is "a forward-thinking utility with a mix of renewable energy in their portfolio," Cohen says.

To make the best use of the power available, ADC is building what Cohen calls state-of-the-art HVAC systems that can cool in excess of 225 watts of power. Thus, ADC can offer air cooling as well as water-cooled cabinets to companies that need them. He thinks water cooling will be a big seller.

As microprocessors need more and more power, eventually he will need liquid cooling, Cohen believes. "We're building hot aisles and cold aisles to increase the efficiency and lower the TCO for the customer," he says.

A real bunker mentality

If you want an even more hardened environment for your data, you might look at the aptly named InfoBunker in Boone, Iowa, about an hour outside Des Moines.

It's about as hard-core as you get -- a 1960s era "purpose-built" underground site that once housed communications equipment used by the North American Aerospace Defense Command and the U.S. Air Force.

Conversion started three years ago, with the site opening for business last October, says Jason McGinnis, president of InfoBunker.

"We have two major sale pitches: One is a lot of open space. We provide standard racks and also private rooms, which have special cooling for equipment," McGinnis says.

The other is sheer security. The 65,000-square-foot, five-story site is dug deep into the ground. No one gets in without passing though the 4.5-ton steel door and then a three-step process. A scanner uses radio frequency to read the would-be entrant's skin as a biometric identifier. He then needs to use a keycard and enter a code on the keypad. This three-tier security is standard for high-level military installations, McGinnis explains.

The site itself offers the speedy network, the power and the cooling -- "everything a modern computing site needs except the computers," McGinnis says.

InfoBunker's Cold War roots show in its three-foot-thick reinforced concrete construction built to survive a "maximum probable event." That would be a 20-megaton nuclear blast at 2.5 miles away. The facility was constructed to keep operating in complete isolation mode -- cut off from the rest of the world and all its amenities -- for three months, according to InfoBunker's Web site.