A floating barge at the Port of Stockton that will house a state-of-the-art data center is ready to land in another tenant, the City of Stockton.
The facility, known as the Stockton 1 Data Center, has been in operation for more than three years and hosts a variety of public and private tenants who use the technology for data backup and disaster recovery.
When Jamil Niazi was named Stockton’s chief information officer in October, he had heard about Nautilus Data Technologies’ data center, a repurposed cargo barge, but didn’t know the details. There wasn’t. He thought it was the remains of a barge used by a famous search engine company and then abandoned.
“When we looked into it, we said, ‘Oh, this isn’t some old Google hand-me-down,'” Niazi said. Industry Insider — California.
Previous technology leaders from Stockton and the region had toured the barge, but “there were no requests, no projects,” Niazi said. “My idea here was that we needed data center colocation. Then I heard about different options and so on and I liked this. So instead of just going on a field trip, I looked at this. I wanted to try it.”
“We’ve given tours and it’s state-of-the-art and it’s drawing people in very quickly. It’s a great data center, it’s resilient. And it’s local and close. Very That’s great. I think the proximity is great. I really liked the security, liquid cooling, and other green features. What’s really great is that we have a separate PG&E grid, so we’re basically isolated from outages. That is what is being done.”
For those familiar with the specs, Nautilus provides a short video that takes you inside the data center.
- 80% more energy efficient than land-based data centers.
- Operating costs are 30% lower than traditional land-based data centers.
- Air emissions will be reduced by 30% compared to land-based centers.
- 7 MW of scalable critical IT loads with 4 vaults onboard: 3 2MW vaults and 1 1MW vault available as powered staging and test centers.
- All vaults offer high-density capacity and can support customers from racking to full vault deployment.
- The system is under vacuum, so there is no risk of leaks or water coming into contact with the IT load.
“It’s really impressive, really clean, really well organized,” Niazi said after touring the barge. “All the cables, everything is actually located there. You can get your own internet feed there. You can put a Comcast-like line there and have a private connection from there to the Microsoft cloud. and replicate some of the data in case of a disaster.”
The city has a major data center in Stockton’s SCB Building, which houses its police headquarters. If necessary, they will go to the barge and work there. “We have a network support infrastructure data center group under our control that we are responsible for,” he said.
Niazi said he was able to secure $200,000 in federal funding through the American Rescue Plan Act, which will go toward some of the Cisco infrastructure the city will use. He then negotiated a lease for space on the barge.
“For the city of Stockton, I told them to give us a very good rate, etc., and they gave us a good rate, and I approved it. Plan So we signed the lease by about July 1st, got it sorted during July, got all our ducks in a row, put some Cisco networking equipment in there, then some servers. We’re going to deploy it and start doing some replication. We’re going to move the Tier 1 stuff to the cloud, and like a hybrid approach, we’re going to add data there, we’re going to put backup devices there.”
When the switch is turned on, it will first back up financial and human resources data for the Stockton Police Department, then the fire department, and then the city. He is confident about the security of his data because of all the potentially sensitive information.
“With two layers of security, it’s very safe to break into,” he said. “There’s security going into the port, which is good, but there’s also security on the Nautilus.Customer he said they have a separate building from the data center for services, so I was really impressed with that and the technology. I did.”
Nautilus has several other very large tenants that use floating data centers for storage, backup, and recovery. San Joaquin County is among public sector tenants using the county for disaster recovery and backup, with Nautilus in December announcing a deal with a “prominent artificial intelligence company.” The company said the deal demonstrates the data center’s ability to host high-density AI applications.
For Niazi, the benefits are closer to home: “When you’re actually at the port, it feels like you’re in another city or state,” he said. “But it’s about five minutes away.”
This story first appeared in Industry Insider — Californiapart of e.Republic; government technology Parent company.
