That is all about an important aspect of cloud which receives scant attention: geographic agnosticism which delivers benefits including securing information far from primary datacenters. Individuals typically do not care where information-related services come from and organizations only care that the physical location of information infrastructures plays to their self-interest. In essence, the "cloud" can be everywhere and anywhere. Issues such as security, latency, and privacy are important, but, frankly, can be resolved in welldesigned, geographically agnostic data centers.
The Underground meets all the needs of the cloud including high levels of reliability, robustness, and energy efficiency. But since the facility is not in or near a large metropolitan area, a few questions need to be answered:
- What about telecommunications support? Not a problem. The Underground has plenty of bandwidth and should be able to acquire more if needed.
- How about skilled labor? The Underground is located about an hour from Carnegie-Mellon and other universities so skilled IT labor should be easily available.
- What about costs? The Underground already has its sunk costs (no pun intended originally) in infrastructure, which offers the previously discussed natural advantages. What Iron Mountain charges for its services is between the company and its customers but the continuing success of the Underground suggests it is competitive, if not more so, than other alternatives.
Even though Iron Mountain has another limestone mine facility, it does not offer all the natural advantages such as dryness that the Underground possesses. Iron Mountain has taken advantage of what nature has provided and added modern business infrastructure capabilities to provide a rock solid environment for the storage of physical objects and digital information.
Iron Mountain's Underground helps preserve our heritage storing the photographs in the Corbis archive, demonstrates how to run as green a data center as is likely to be possible Room 48, and may provide the physical origination point for the computing and information resources that are necessary to power the "cloud." That makes the Underground a very interesting place today and one that may play an important, if hidden, role in the future as consumers and businesses access computing resources and information.
At the time of publication, Iron Mountain was not a client of David Hill and the Mesabi Group.
