Tennessee watches data center sink -- and eyes balky dam

Computerworld - The 70,000-square-foot data center that Tennessee's government built 20 years ago in Nashville probably was celebrated as a symbol of the state's paperless future. And what better way to make a powerful statement about that new direction than to construct a data center on top of a paper-stuffed landfill?

It was a poetic location in other ways as well. The data center was built near a river and railroad tracks -- creating a landscape of old transportation systems and modern IT networks working in close proximity to one another.

So in sum: The state located its data center on top of unstable, jiggly ground near a railroad and in a floodplain. Twenty years later, the data center's floor is cracking, and part of the facility is sinking, and Tennessee plans to spend $68 million to build two new data centers -- each located on high, dry and stable ground.

And state officials had better hurry.

In addition to its internal woes, the existing data center is located downstream from the Wolf Creek Dam, a 5,700-foot structure located on the Cumberland River in Jamestown, Ky. In a report released in April, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers identified Wolf Creek -- which holds back the largest reservoir in the U.S. east of the Mississippi River -- as one of the five dams nationwide at most risk of failing. In fact, Wolf Creek was at the top of the list.

The current data center has "almost every problem imaginable," said Mark Bengle, Tennessee's deputy CIO. "The standards that it was built to 20 years ago are certainly not the standards that we would build a data center to today."

Bengle said the problems were apparent several years ago, when he started working for the state. The cracking of the floor and settling of the data center aren't dramatic, and there's no danger of a sci-fi ending in which the data center disappears into the muck. But it's enough of an issue to cause the state's IT staff to move heavy equipment away from problematic spots in the data center.

The new data centers, each with about 35,000 square feet of floor space, will be located 30 miles apart, Bengle said. Processing will be split between the two facilities, and each will have enough systems capacity to pick up the workload of the other if need be. The project is expected to be completed in 2010, after about two years of construction work.

The Nashville area is actually a good place to build a data center, according to Bengle. There are no hurricanes, and tornadoes "don't touch down too often," he said.