Door number 1 of 5 doors to get to the server area in Verne Global’s data center. There’s a security checking photo ID before you go into the man trap (doors 2 & 3), followed by at least 2 more doors.
Equipment deliveries have a similar man-trap style arrangement for vehicles before they can unload.
After you get through the man-trap, you’re in a small lobby area with a couple of pictures on the walls. Everywhere you go in Iceland, you’ve got some token of fine art work in the form of paintings and/or statutes.
Through another card-key door, we move into Colt pre-fab data center land. Everything you see in white and shiny metal is built by Colt, designed for shipment and quick assembly into data center space into any “raw” space. It took four months from shipping from the UK to Iceland into ready-to-use commissioning — including burn-in testing of power and air circulation — with Verne providing the empty warehouse space.
The outside of the data center Colt pre-fab space. The bright orange bottles are environmentally-friendly fire suppression gas, a mix of argon and nitrogen which is “unpleasant” to breath when discharged, but won’t kill you.
All of this is just one big frickin’ warehouse. Bonus points for cooling with the big concrete slab that happens to conveniently double as a cold sink.
Above is outside air intake and air sampling gear. Outside air is use for “free” cooling. Since Iceland is pretty cold and wet for over half the year, you can simply suck ambient air through the facility to keep the servers at a comfy temperature.
If there’s too much particulate matter in the inbound air — local fire, random volcanic ash (But VERY unlikely, the data center is on the southwest part of Iceland while the active volcanoes are on the other side of the island and the wind blows eastward towards Europe — no problems in the capital, very annoyed air travelers) — the air intakes shut down and air goes into recirculation mode.