Seagate Moves Servers 220 Feet Underground

Seagate, known primarily for its data storage products, has agreed to move servers it uses to provide cloud backup and disaster recovery services, into an underground data center near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, operated by Iron Mountain.

Iron Mountain’s National Underground Data Center is located 220 feet below ground in a former limestone mine in a town called Boyers, about 65 miles north of Pittsburgh. Iron Mountain has built secure storage facilities in the mine for movie studio reels and photo archives, as well as for document storage by the federal Office of Personnel Management.

Over the past several years the company has built out data center space in the facility. In 2013, the company announced it would become a data center provider and hired Compass Datacenters to build another server farm for it in Boston suburbs.

The Seagate deal is both a colocation deal and a reseller partnership. Iron Mountain will resell Seagate’s cloud backup and DR services hosted at its data center.

In a statement, Jason Buffington, senior data protection analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group, said, “Combining Seagate’s expertise as an early innovator in hybrid data protection, built on on-premises appliances and cloud repositories with Iron Mountain’s solid reputation as a trusted protector of data and assets should be a welcome pairing for customers and partners looking for hybrid protection.”

There are several data center facilities built underground in former mines and military bunkers in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia. See a list of subterranean data centers compiled by Data Center Knowledge.