The Vatican Library’s Data Centres

One of my earlier posts explored some of the advantages analogue media have over digital media when information needs to be preserved for a very long time. It was, admittedly, a little provocative. It may have left the impression that, for some mysterious reason, we have to choose between the two formats. Naturally, that is not the case.

The Vatican Library does have a separate research project whose goal is to preserve its most valuable manuscripts on analogue media for at least 500 years. But it is by no means turning its back on the advantages of digital storage: speed, accessibility, ease of copying, and so on.

The librarians at the Vatican skilfully combine the strengths of different data formats. To work with digital materials, they have two modern data centres built using Panduit solutions.

The data centres are at separate sites only a few hundred metres apart, yet one is formally located in Vatican City and the other in Italy.

One data centre is black and the other is white. The white data centre is said to use several per cent less energy for cooling because it heats up less than the black one. Has anyone seen any research on this?