It seems swimmers in Zurich, Switzerland will enjoy a nice and warm pool this summer, thanks to a most unusual power source -

Excess heat from an underground data center built inside a former military bunker is being collected and transferred to the nearby pool as part of an innovative energy-efficiency project undertaken by GIB-Services, a Swiss IT collocation company.

The bunker, capable of withstanding a nuclear bomb, was built in 1971 on the outskirts of Zurich to protect the Swiss Army communications team and has been out of use for several years. Accessible through a woodland path in the middle of a forest and built 7 meters (23 feet) underground, the shelter was purchased by GIB three years ago and turned into a data center in a project that was completed in the past few weeks. Because the data center generates so much heat, GIB negotiated with local government officials to pump heat to an indoor facility with several swimming pools, according to IBM, which designed and built the data center for GIB.

“With more efficient building design and up-to-date server technology, energy costs can typically be reduced by 50% when a company builds a new data center or even retrofits an existing one,” says Steve Sams, IBM’s vice president of site and facilities services.

Read the full story here.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 9:32 am and is filed under IBM, IT, Internet, Technology, community, data center. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.