Data centers are often placed in repurposed buildings, with old military-built structures – especially bomb shelters – enjoying popularity for their rugged design and secure locations. And sometimes, they are placed in structures that were never meant to house people or any kind of electronic gear.

The IT team of Altamonte Springs, a 40,000-plus city in Central Florida, placed its new data center in a 770,000-gallon water tank decommissioned by the city several years ago, Computer World reported. The tank, with its eight-inch-thick reinforced-concrete walls, was a good alternative to a server room that used to house IT gear in the City Hall of this hurricane-prone town.

The old data center was designed to withstand Category 1 hurricanes and every time Altamonte Springs expected a stronger hurricane – such as Category 3 and 4 twisters that hit the town in 2004 – all It equipment had to be packed away into storage units and the system had to be put back together after the storm, the city’s Director of Information Services Larry DiGioia told Computer world.

"We literally had to dismantle everything. It was a horrible experience," DiGioia said. "The emergency operation center was shut down also because there wasn't infrastructure in place to support Internet access during a storm."

Moving location was not the only thing DiGioia did to strengthen the IT infrastructure. He and his team moved the city into a fully virtualized environment, consolidating physical servers from 80 to 12 Dell quad-core machines, and reduced SAN management requirements.

Two buildings were built on either side of the tank – one for networking gear and the other for administrative offices.

All in all, the city invested less than $2m into the project that was completed in about 18 months. Refurbishing the water tank cost about $1.5;two new SAN’s cost $250,000 and VMware deployments cost $5,000 per server (the environment is running 30 virtual machines).