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city-of-the-future
You've got to hand it to the folks Swedish ISP Bahnhof. They've got style. A few months back we wrote about their Pionen data center. Nestled in a former nuclear bunker just south of Stockholm, it has plants, cool glass conference rooms and waterfalls, inspired by science-fiction classics such as Silent Running.
Now they've started construction on a futuristic modular data center, designed by a Bahnhof sister company called MDC Stockholm. The idea is to take tank-quality steel and build out special data-center containers that can be quickly added stacked and linked using an inflatable command module. The module is built by Lindstrand Technologies — the same company that built the parachute used by the ill-fated Beagle 2 Mars mission.
"It's very expensive to build a data center, and you always always end up with a lot of empty space before you have any clients," says Jon Karlung, Bahnhof's CEO. With a modular data center, you can expand as you need more space rather than building out a massive complex and waiting to fill your capacity. He says that his designers again took a few pages from sci-fi classics such as Space 1999 and Star Trek.
