Your local mall may also be a data center

Brick-and-mortar retail has been increasingly troubled over the years as online shopping has become near universal. In a fitting turn of events, server hosting companies are increasingly turning to vacant retail locationsas a source of cheap floor space for server farms. In fact, your local mall could be hosting several small clusters of servers any youd never know it.

Millions of square feet of retail space sit idle across the US as department stores continue to close up shop in marginal markets to focus on the ones that remain profitable. These large open spaces arent good for much without serious refitting, but several aspects of your average department store makes for an excellent server room.

The basic construction makes it easy to reinforce the walls and roof to withstand tornadoes and hurricanes, which is important for servers hosting vital information. The lack of windows is also a big plus. Some malls have also served as bomb shelters in the past, so its possible the structure is already sufficiently sturdy that little to no modification is needed. No matter where a company decides to set up a server room, they will have to add a high-capacity fiber internet connection. That sort of thing doesnt come standard with a vacant Target store.

In some cases these retail spaces have been empty for years, so any economic activity is better than none. However, the handful of employees it takes to run a small data center dont compare to the small army of employees it takes to run a department store.

One notable drawback of this new residential data center approach is the relative lack of security. An active mall isnt going to be suitable for housing certain kinds of sensitive data and services. However, smaller customers like law firms and hospitals that need a few racks to save important documents can get a good deal on server space from a company operating out of what was once a K-Mart.

Now read: NSA data center will use 1.7M gallons of water per day to read your email

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Your local mall may also be a data center