Canadian Diefenbunker from the 60’s now transformed in Dataville

Canadian Diefenbunker from the 60’s now transformed in Dataville.(Corda).An American-born businessman and London School of Economics graduate, Self, 44, isn’t your typical desk-bound CEO. He has a sailor’s tan, slicked-back hair and a full beard. An old-fashioned Orson Welles-like sense of confidence envelops him, as do fra­grant clouds of smoke from the Montecristo Mini cigars he frequently has in hand.When he was in his 20s, Self-launched a successful communica­tions company that laid down fiber-optic cable in New York City’s “Silicon Alley.” Business was good, but he craved the outdoor life he’d known growing up on Martha’s Vineyard. One Labor Day weekend, while sail­ing through Nova Scotia with friends, he stumbled on a cabin for sale on a secluded island in Halifax Harbor. He snapped it up as a weekend retreat, sleeping in a hammock while he fixed up the property. “It was a real dream come true to rediscover nature after living in a concrete jungle,” Self re­calls. A few years later he left big-city living for good.

But Self began to grow antsy with the simple life. Before long the serial entrepreneur—who had also tried his hand at commercial shellfish har­vesting and biotech, among other ven­tures—had a vision for changing how large institutions processed and safe­guarded valuable information. At the time, computer data was primarily pro­cessed and stored in urban areas, leav­ing it vulnerable to security breaches, acts of God and outages.
Self’s solution: Set up an international data center l cated far from natural and man-made threats, one that could protect the In­ternet and electronic records the way a bricks-and-mortar bank protects money. And what better country for this data center than Canada? Strict privacy laws, a stable economy and a solid infrastructure made it ideal.
Self took the idea to his Wall Street banking customers in 1999. But Can­ada proved to be a hard sell below the border. “Server huggers”—managers who wanted to keep their hardware a cab ride away—didn’t want to contend with the distance. It was, Self now likes to joke, a place his fellow Amer­icans only knew of thanks to the Carly Simon song, “Halfway Round the World.” Undaunted, Self put the plan on hold.
Then came 9/11. Very quickly, big institutions saw just how important it was to run their computer servers and store valuable information away from financial centers. And technology had finally caught up with Self’s imagina­tion. Dial-up connections and spotty Internet access were a thing of the past. Three trans-Atlantic fiber-optic cables were under construction be­tween the northeastern United States and the U.K., which meant Self could promise his clients their data would be transmitted, processed and stored in mere fractions of a second. “When you’re trading billions of dollars’ worth of securities transactions,” he explains, “every millisecond delay could lose you millions of dollars.” Canada had the potential to be, as he puts it, a “digital infrastructure bridge between the Americas and Europe.”
And Self was convinced that Nova Scotia, located on the shortest fibrotic path between financial hubs, could become its gateway. The challenge he now faced was to find the perfect location. While casting about for a property big enough to house, power and cool tens of thousands of computer servers, he heard about the province’s once-top-secret Diefenbunkers—and an available facility in Debert, an 80-minute drive from Halifax. Beyond its intriguing history, the site had other benefits. The Diefenbunker was buried ten meters below the surface, so it was naturally cool— perfect for tempering the tremendous heat generated by computer servers. A nearby underground lake would provide geothermal cooling for millions of watts of heat, cutting operating costs in half. And because it was built to withstand nukes, the bunker was solid: One structural engineer told Self that the building—valued at a little over $1 million—would last another 500 years.
So in 2009, after reams of paperwork and another million-plus dollars in legal fees and closing costs, Self was the proud owner of a bomb shelter. He christened it Dataville and began extensive renovations to bring the mechanical and electrical systems into the 21st century.
Dataville already feels post-apocalyptic, as if Dr. No might lurk behind the thick steel doors. Self leads me past former decontamination showers into a 1,000-square-foot loft where he sometimes sleeps on late work nights. Jo-Dee, an Australian shepherd dog who belongs to a Dataville employee, herds us through an empty cafeteria. Café Bustelo coffee cans are lined up like props for an Andy Warhol painting. Jo-Dee trots ahead, past walls of control panels, a former CBC Radio emergency broadcasting room and a series of locked doors. Caged computer servers hum in a former command center for Norad’s early-warning missile system.The cavernous bunker holds dozens of tech staff who work all hours of the day to reconfigure computer servers, maintain generators and update networks. Many make the commute from Halifax and, when necessary, stay over in the second floor bedrooms originally built for government officials.When asked what it’s like sleeping in a bomb shelter, Self says, “It’s really womblike. People have great sleeps here.”Read the full story here.