What added value can an aging bunker complex still offer these days and age? This was the question ewl energie wasser Luzern, the leading energy services company in Lucerne, Switzerland, asked itself in 2020.

What added value can an aging bunker complex still offer these days and age? This was the question ewl energie wasser Luzern, the leading energy services company in Lucerne, Switzerland, asked itself in 2020.

They were talking about an old underground civil defense bunker in Lucerne. Their response: build one of the most sophisticated data centers in Switzerland. Today, the Stollen Lucerne Data Center boasts five major tunnels, each with 200 square meters for IT system hardware.

In addition, there are eight auxiliary tunnels, referred to as Private Rooms, each totaling 50 to 100 square meters for IT-system hardware.

The CO2-neutral facility, operated by ewl, combines state-of-the-art technology with sustainability and an optimal connection to the communication and energy networks. Sustainability plays an important role for ewl, with the energy service provider implementing the transition to renewable energy in Lucerne and thus making a decisive contribution to the energy transition.

Accordingly, the Stollen Lucerne Data Center was deliberately developed as a sustainable data center. Its operation is CO2-neutral and highly energy-efficient. The data center is operated sustainably with green electricity and cooled with lake water from the nearby Lake Lucerne.

Waste heat from the servers is fed into the lake energy network, which in return heats buildings in the surrounding area in an environmentally friendly way. The conversion of the civil defense bunker also allows a reduction in gray energy, energy produced from polluting resources, and is a sensible use of existing, unused building volume.

The underground location of the Stollen Lucerne Data Center not only offers advantages in terms of sustainability, but also guarantees a very high standard of physical security and availability of the mission critical infrastructure.

The data center also has complex encryption solutions and firewalls to protect the data stored on-site digitally from unauthorized access. Thanks to biometric access controls down to rack level and end-to-end video surveillance, the data center team can track who is doing what and when in each section of the data center.

The data center's maximum availability also ensures operational reliability. It is therefore able to maintain continuous operation without planned interruptions. This is crucial for preventing data loss and ensuring business continuity.

Thanks to these diverse measures and forward-looking infrastructure, the Stollen Lucerne data center successfully passed the TSI Level 3 “extended” certification in November 2023.

Trusted Site Infrastructure (TSI) is an established methodology for evaluating and certifying the physical security and availability of data centers that has been on the market for more than two decades.

With its different assessment areas, this takes a holistic approach that focuses on both the physical infrastructure as well as organizational processes and documentation of your data center.

The goal is to optimally secure the data center by implementing and fulfilling the various planning, organizational and technical requirements, thus ensuring the highest possible availability.

It is based on the TSI.STANDARD criteria catalog developed by TÜV Informationstechnik GmbH (TÜVIT, Member of TÜV NORD GROUP), which is in alignment with European and international standards for data centers, such as the EN 50600, the ISO/IEC 22237 and various other standards.

Marco Reinhard, managing director of ewl Data Center said, "The certification shows that we have been continuously committed to the highest standards in terms of security, availability and efficiency of the IT infrastructure since the beginning. We are proud of the certification and at the same time take it as motivation to continue to attach the greatest importance to availability and security in the future."

"We are delighted that we were able to support this innovative data center project from the very beginning and crown it with our TSI certificate at the end", added Mario Lukas, senior account manager, Data Center at TÜVIT.

You can find more information about the Stollen Lucerne Data Center here.