Cold storage - an Arctic solution to the data storage cooling problem

It’s a truism of living in the West that more and more of our lives are bound up with the digital world. We generate a storm of data throughout the day, whether we want to or not — when we shop or when we use our bank accounts or our phones — our salaries are logged in our employers’ data systems, as are our tax records. Social networking adds to the data, as do online photo storage and other internet-based activities. And the amount of data we generate personally is dwarfed by the numbers generated by government, industry and commerce.

All this data has to be stored and this is giving rise to a new form of building, characteristic to the early 21st century: the data centre. Sharing some of the form and characteristics of ages-old strongrooms and more modern hardened bunkers, these are the locations that keep the numbers vital to our lifestyles, and the fortunes of government and industry, safe. But this has also generated a set of problems for civil engineers. The most vital thing that a data centre has to do is to keep its ranks of computer servers running. For that, they need two things: power and cooling.