Moreover, the cooling and power equipment for Room 48 is stored outside in a hallway. This reduces the heat thrown off by these elements from the room itself and has the added benefit of isolating maintenance and upgrade work for servers from that of the support infrastructure. For example, making a change in cooling equipment does not require maintenance people to enter the server room, which eliminates the risk of accidents and unintended impacts on the server farm. This also means that servers are easier to configure for hot-air and cold-air aisle designs. In addition, the overall cooling and power doesn't have to work as hard as above ground data centers due to the fact that the ambient temperature of 55 degrees F offers plenty of "free" cooling.
In essence, the Underground provides Iron Mountain a compelling case and a competitive differentiator when talking about green data centers.
Of course, Iron Mountain will continue to use the Underground to service business customers with solutions such as LiveVault and its Connected service for data protection and recovery, archiving, eDiscovery and intellectual property management. And of course, Iron Mountain can provide a range of related, highly synergistic services ranging from co-location to managed services, hosted services, and leasing a complete data center.
But let's speculate a bit. Computing environment continues to bifurcate into individually-maintained devices, including smart phones, tablets, laptops, and even desktops, and organizationally-managed devices such as servers, storage arrays, and telecommunications infrastructures. The latter can broadly be called the "cloud" in the sense that, to individuals, it is all behind a curtain that obscures when, where or how capabilities are provided.
Now, we in the industry know that this "cloud" is not what it is incessantly hyped to be. However, although they will never be perfect, the two cloud approaches, private and public are likely to eventually converge. Organizations will follow various cloud models, but the end result is likely to contain strong elements from concepts such as software-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service. This is important since the cloud is, in effect, able to manage geographically dispersed data assets efficiently.
