Naver secures digital history, energy

CHUNCHEON, Gangwon Province -- At the foot of Mount Gubong in Chuncheon, Gangwon Province stands an oddly-shaped building guarded with heavy security -- Naver’s Data Center Gak.

It is where South Korea’s leading search engine and web portal Naver operates thousands of servers that store and manage its expansive data from services including emails, online blogs, cloud services and search queries.

To symbolize the spirit of the data center as a space to store records, Naver named it “Gak” after “Janggyeonggak,” or the Janggyeong Panjeon at the Haeinsa Temple, where some 80,000 woodblocks containing Buddhist historical records are preserved.

“The center began under a mission to digitally store the vast amounts of data that represents the lives of our users,” the chief executive of the Naver Business Platform Park Won-ki told reporters at the center Friday.

“As did Janggyeonggak in the past, the center adopted cutting-edge building schemes, equipment and operational systems to ensure the most energy efficient and safe management of modern data,” said the Naver executive.

The Gak Center, which opened in June 2013, stands on some 54,229 square meters of land and consists of four buildings -- the main maintenance center and three server storage centers.

Together, the facility can house roughly 12,000 server units that are each able to hold around 7.5 terabytes of data -- or around of 900 petabytes (1 petabyte equals 1,024 terabytes). To store this much information in print would require some 10,000 libraries, with each holding 9 million books, Park said.

Every second, Naver users in Korea and abroad type in some 7,400 search keywords, exchange around 2,500 emails and upload some 450 photos onto its cloud service. These are all stored by the company’s servers in real-time.

To safeguard its massive data from theft, cyberattacks or natural disasters, Naver links its Gak data center to two additional server facilities in Gasan-dong and Magok-dong in Seoul, where user data is constantly backed up.

“The multiple layers of data protection we have set up ensures that valuable user data is not lost under any circumstance,” Park said.

As Korea’s most advanced data storage facility, the Gak Center boasts high energy efficiency by using a range of specialized equipment and operational systems that can minimize energy needed for running and cooling its servers.

Naver’s Gak Center is certified as “platinum” under the global green building design rating system LEED -- the first for any data center in the world. The facility’s power usage effectiveness stands at 1.12 which is lower than the global average of 1.8, with one representing no energy being lost.

The company has developed customized servers that can properly function at temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius, much higher than the industry average, cutting down energy needed for cooling.

As one of several energy conservation methods, the center also brings in natural air from the outside during winter to help cool its equipment. To enable this, the building was designed to maximize wind flow into certain areas.

“The Janggyeonggak, built with the most advanced technology of its day, protected its historical records for 750 years. Likewise, the Gak Center will strive to digitally protect our records with its advanced, eco friendly technologies,” Park said.

By Sohn Ji-young (jys@heraldcorp.com)