Moore's Law in Effect: The Westland Underground Bunker Data Center Expansion

10 Apr 2014 by Datacenters.com Technology

"Back in 1965, Gordon Moore, who went on to found a small company that would later be known as Intel, gave a transcendent speech, in which he observed that the number of microcomponents that could be placed in a microchip (integrated circuit) of the lowest manufacturing cost was doubling every year. He also went on to predict that this trend would continue into the future - with occasional tweaking of the law - occasionally adjusting to reflect trends in production rates - the definition has maintained the original prediction only that now the doubling rate occurs every 18 months.

The vast doubling of the amount of microchips continues to rise, and with it to vast amounts of data centers continues to rise. Enter a giant bunker of an underground data center that once the expansion is complete will triple the size of the original structure. That's a lot of microchips.

Westland Bunker Will Triple in Size
The current data center bunker was built as a nuclear bomb shelter and is fully underground. This concept is not new to datacenters, as many of the centers are located in old warehouses and the occasional fall-out shelter. The Westland Bunker has been called ""The most secure data center in the US"" - due to its isolated underground fortress-like design, that can literally withstand a direct nuclear attacker - and thus, the perfect home for mission critical IT and business operations.

The Westland bunker, location in Montgomery, TX, partnered with the Houston-based Evolve Data Center Solutions, LLC, to build the expansion to 105,000 square feet and 12 megawatts of power (and uses geothermal cooling) - for a total of 143,000 square feet of massively reinforced datacenter.
Westland Bunker Aerial View - Expansion on the Right

The companies will break ground on April 14th with an expected completion date of early 2015. The expansion will be built into the surrounding terrain with a tunnel connecting the two main data centers.

Houston has become a hot bed for datacenter activity with large centers from CyrusOne Inc, Digital Realty Trust Inc. and Data Foundry(who will break ground on their own center on April 10th.)

With data center expansion of this magnitude, the amount of integrated circuits (microchips) is sure to rise, and possibly start closing the doubling time gap, and possibly the need to amend Moore's Law's definition.
Westland Bunker Expansion Artist Rendering - Level One.

Protect your data and for all things cloud, internet or data center related: go to datacenters.com or call one of our data center specialists at (877) 406-2248."

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