Inside the 'James Bond Villain' Data Center

Update: As of Dec. 2, 2010, Bahnhof was serving as one of the European hosts for the Wikileaks web site, which is no longer using the Amazon Web Services cloud to distribute its files. See Netcraft for details.

In an underground bunker 100 feet beneath Stockholm lies a unique facility operated by the Swedish ISP Bahnhof. It's become known as the "James Bond Villain Data Center" after it was featured on the Pingdom web site last year. Dean Nelson of Data Center Pulse recently got a tour of the data center from Bahnhof CEO Jon Karlung, who provided a look at the many unusual features of the facility, a former military bunker designed to withstand a hydrogen bomb blast. Karlung has said he drew his inspiration for many of the center's flourishes from James Bond villains (especially Ernst Blofeld), hence the waterfalls, greenhouse-style NOC, glass-enclosed conference room "floating" above the colocation floor, and blue-lit diesel engines (supposedly used in German submarines). This video runs about 9 minutes.

See Data Center Pulse for more about the group. For additional video, visit our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.