Why the News interest in LightEdge SubTropolis?
Over the last month, LightEdge Solutions has been interviewed by NBC’s Harry Smith of the Today show and the local Fox news channel in their SubTropolis data center. Why the sudden interest in this underground data center facility?
First, if you are not familiar, let me give you the overview: in 2104 LightEdge built a state of the art data center in an underground mine in Kansas City called SubTropolis. SubTropolis sits 125 feet underground in a solid Limestone mine. Owned by Hunt Midwest, Subtropolis has over 6,000,000 Square Feet of space in use. It houses some interesting companies that store Hollywood archives, US Postal Services Stamps and Food Distributors. The Lightedge data center facility is protected from the elements underground, where it is 65 degrees year round. Out of this facility Lightedge offers colocation, cloud services and professional consulting services.
One thing Harry Smith kept saying while interviewing me for the Today show was “I have found the Cloud and it is underground in Kansas City.” I thought this perspective was interesting. My initial reaction was to laugh. But therein lies the reason, I believe, there is sudden interest in our facility.
Colocation, managed IT Services (early predecessor of cloud) and professional consulting services have been available to business for decades. The average person outside of IT would never give this another thought. With the advent of SmartPhones, Social Media and apps, everyone is now aware of the cloud. And it a mystery to most. We just know that when we take pictures with our iPhone, they go to the cloud and we can retrieve them when needed.
So what is the Cloud? Loosely, a collection of Servers, networking, storage and internet that allow companies to consume these resources on an as needed basis in order to process data. This data can be accessed by consumers wherever they may be. The cloud is housed in highly-available, redundant facilities that are constantly monitored for security and environmental conditions. In short, a mine makes a ton of sense to house mission critical, highly available, cloud data and resources.
So to answer Harry – yes the cloud is underground in a mine in Kansas City!
