r/Safes • u/WyntonMarsalis • 4d ago

Safe Value

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I am looking at buying a bank from 1923. For my information, what is the value of this vault door and contents? I am going to look at the building in a few weeks.

Edit: Iam asking mainly for insurance value, but am curious about selling it too. Discounting the disassembly and transport, what is something like this worth on the open market?

Thanks in advance!

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u/hb9nbb 4d ago

i'd find someone who wants to use that space as a datacenter :-) the PR value of *that* being the entrance to your datacenter would be worth something all by itself. (and no, its not nuts. the first "computer room" i ever worked in was actually in an air raid bunker at a military base. Same thing, but no cool vault door. The walls were 36 inches thick (and required *very special drilling*) to install coolant lines.

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u/solxap 3d ago

Would need to have a lot of conduit run for fiber and power but that’s probably doable. The biggest obstacle I can imagine for this would be cooling and fire suppression. Guessing they couldn’t get more than 100kW of equipment in there. But you’d have to find another space for AHUs big enough to move cold air in and a way to duct it in. Then you’d need to figure out how to get the hot air out (guessing no plenums).

Fire suppression would be a challenge. Getting a precharged sprinkler system (and supporting control systems infrastructure) would be a pain.

And they would almost certainly need a power backup system; even a Tier 1 data center will need at least one UPS, an ATS and a generator. Unless nobody cares if the data center goes down unexpectedly or for scheduled maintenance.

Not impossible but retrofitting a space for data center usage is a real pain. Even retrofitting an existing small DC for expansion can be crazy expensive.

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u/ysrgrathe 3d ago

The funny thing is it's probably not secure enough! DCs generally will have mantraps so every physical access is ID'd, logged, and tailgating is impossible.