German Airport Digs Deep With Underground Data Center

Frankfurt, the financial industry hub known officially as Frankfurt-on-the-Main, and unofficially as' Main-hattan', is home to Germany's largest airport, which is expected to see passenger and air freight requirements double by 2020.

Every one minute and seven seconds, a plane either takes off or lands at Frankfurt, and the airport handles some 450 million pieces of luggage annually. Needless to say, logistical concerns have been known to keep airport officials awake at night.

In December 2006, Fraport, the company that operates the airport, opened the doors on a new subterranean data center that controls all IT and network operations for the facility. The high availability data center is a far cry from the airport's old data center, a boxy, two story cement block building that's situated just a few meters from a nearby access road, protected only by a small fence.

The Fraport data center manages all airport functions with the exception of flight control, which is handled by the German government flight security agency. About 5 miles before a plane lands, the data center connects with the incoming plane and starts gathering data to manage airport services such as gate assignment, luggage handling, ground traffic, and flight connection information.

The data center houses 20 flight critical applications, and 50 applications that are flight relevant, and that leaves zero margin for downtime, according to Andreas Veltkamp, an enterprise account manager with APC-MGE, which oversaw the design of the Fraport data center infrastructure. "If one part in the chain fails, we have to fix it quickly, or shut down the airport," he said.

"Airports generally don't want to outsource their data center operations, for security reasons. So we tried to hide it, because it more or less holds the heart of logistics for the airport," added Veltkamp.

Gedas Operational Services, a joint venture between Fraport and German IT service provider T-Systems, operates the data center, which is currently running at about 30 percent capacity, with the other 70 percent earmarked for outsourcing.

Fraport is aiming to sell the space to companies looking to avoid the cost and hassle of building out their own data center infrastructure, and hopes to take advantage of economies of scale in order to reduce its own IT costs, said Veltkamp.

"The goal of the joint venture is not only to operate Frankfurt Airport's IT systems, but also to grow via orders from other companies," he said.