The company is converting a submarine bunker built by the Germans during World War II into a data center. They already had some advanced designs when WWII started, but as the war progressed, and as Allies’ bombs grew bigger, the concrete bunker roofs got thicker. Germans developed (and perfected) U-boat bunkers during the First World War to protect their subs from aerial bombs. The U-boat garage in Marseille, whose roof is nearly 6 meters thick, is one of the later designs, created after numerous 12,000-pound Tallboy and 22,000-pound Grand Slam bunker-buster bombs dropped by the Allies successfully penetrated some of the earlier shelters, according to U-Boat Aces, a site specializing in German U-boat history. Together with MRS 2, a data center Interxion is developing in a 1950s warehouse across the street (the one where Schneider built the urgently needed cable POP), the site will have 80MW of power capacity total, with the company expecting to spend €180 million to develop it. The system then becomes a battery storage system based on lithium-ion, taking advantage of the power management already available in the power bank. The big port city in the south of France that’s fought long and hard to shed its reputation as a criminal hot spot and build its image as a welcoming tourist destination on the Mediterranean has a huge geographic advantage over the other European hubs for companies that want to deliver digital services in the high-growth markets outside of Europe.
Submarine cable consortia – the telco cartels that control most intercontinental bandwidth – have known this for many years; cables that land in Marseille take advantage of the straight shot across the Mediterranean to multiple North African countries, but also east, via Alexandria, through the Suez Canal, along the Gulf of Suez, and across the Indian Ocean to Mumbai. Interxion is working with an architect to preserve the historic building’s original structure, while adding modern elements, such as a garden and a bar, both on the roof, with spectacular views of the city and the Mediterranean to entertain clients. Adding content to the mix of clients means you’re no longer just selling one rack to carrier A or two racks to carrier B, what is control cable Coquio said. They were preceded by heavy air bombing and more than two hours of naval bombardment. Not only would they bring more bandwidth, they would dramatically shrink network latency on the route. The demand is so urgent that Interxion, one of Europe’s largest data center providers, had to scramble to build a facility to house a network point of presence (POP) in Marseille for one of the two new cables. That 80MW will be delivered over two 40MW feeds for redundancy, according to a company presentation.
Conversely, scale and social feeds can not only absorb the loss of key titles, they can make a star out of an unknown simply by spotlighting their content. But, if Billboard bases its charts on what is already being played on the radio and purchased in music stores, how do radio stations find out about new music? This development is being spearheaded by NASA Dryden Flight Research Center. The bureau was created to ease the growing problem of messages being delivered to the wrong recipients. The effect of that latency drop on the market is what Interxion bet on when it bought MRS 1. “When you’ve got not only the pipe growing but also the latency dropping, then some applications – particularly from the cloud sector, digital media sector – can require to be positioned in a very specific data center, so that they can benefit from that latency effect and the capacity effect,” he said in an interview with Data Center Knowledge.
Quickly growing demand in markets south and east of Europe combined with access to so many cables that connect Europe to those markets make Marseille a sought-after gateway and Interxion a gatekeeper. But as much as Coquio hopes to disrupt the acronym that neatly forms the familiar word FLAP by inserting an “M” (as in FLAMP), Marseille is not likely to become as big a data center market as the FLAP cities are. Cloud and content are huge data center users, but so are banks, insurance companies, manufacturers, and governments. Not only does a Google or an Amazon want a network POP in Europe that’s the shortest possible distance from Singapore, it now also wants to store tons of content near that POP. As a result, Marseille has become the fastest-growing market in Europe in terms of international network bandwidth, Hjembo said in an interview with Data Center Knowledge. “None of the other big hubs are close to that,” Hjembo said. Hjembo sees Marseille becoming a similar market to Stockholm, which only has enough room for two or three major players. Operators of the AAE-1 cable wanted two POPs in the city immediately, but Interxion only had one. The data center, called MRS 1, was already an aggregation point for eight cables that landed in Marseille and elsewhere on the Côte d’Azur at the time, but the two new ones – AAE-1 (landing in Marseille) and SeaMeWe-5 (landing in nearby Toulon) – would be game-changers.
