Iron Mountain, a US company known primarily for its records-management services, unveiled a portfolio of data center services Tuesday.

The company is offering wholesale and retail data center space in its underground property in Boyers, Pennsylvania. The data center is located in a former limestone mine the company has owned since it started as a document-storage business after World War II.

While Iron Mountain has leased data center space in the cavern to a few tenants selectively over the last ten years or so, this is the first time it is making a major push into the data center market, establishing the Iron Mountain Data Centers business unit. The company said it was actively exploring additional data center locations on its existing properties in other markets.

Mark Kidd, senior VP and general manager of data centers at Iron Mountain, said the company was packaging services to make it easier for enterprises to outsource. “And our DNA in tracking information assets from creation to disposition is particularly differentiating for organizations that must comply with industry regulations.”

The company’s wholesale data center offering provides dedicated space for all or part of an organization’s data center operations and offers a range of services, including engineering and design, development and construction, and ongoing facility operations and management. For organizations needing a smaller footprint, its retail colocation solution provides a shared environment with scalable space, power and cooling.

In addition to space, power and cooling, Iron Mountain is offering migration services, installation and remote hands, network services, off-site tape storage and IT asset disposition.

The limestone mine is 220 ft below ground, with ambient temperatures in the mid-F50s achieved by geothermal cooling and natural protection from extreme weather events.

One of its existing data center clients is Mariott International. In 2008, Marriott leased 12,500 sq ft of space to establish a data center there for disaster recovery purposes.

The company was started as Iron Mountain Atomic Storage by a US businessman named Herman Knaust in the 1950s. Before and throughout WWII, Knaust owned one of the world’s largest mushroom-growing companies, called Knaust Brothers, which grew mushrooms in underground caverns in multiple US locations.

After the war, Knaust established Iron Mountain to store documents in his underground facilities for companies who were afraid they would get destroyed in case of nuclear war. Knaust’s Iron Mountain went bankrupt in the 1970s and was sold to a private investor, before re-emerging and growing into a large publicly-traded corporation it is today.

Read a DatacenterDynamics FOCUS feature on Knaust’s mushroom empire and another one of his caverns that is currently being marketed as a data center site.