I think OWSAP needs to update its DDoS vectors to include "HN front page listing".
Building a data center in a nuclear fallout shelter
11–20 of 24 posts
Re: Building a data center in a nuclear fallout shelter
#12I think OWSAP needs to update its DDoS vectors to include "HN front page listing".
Pretty disappointing for a web host offering secure and reliable storage to have their blog taken down so easily.
Re: Building a data center in a nuclear fallout shelter
#13> the racks we use for C14 ... weigh more than one ton on less than one square foot
> Each C14 rack weights more than one ton on less than one square meter.
I think the 1st of these was "translated" from metric; the latter sounds much more reasonable.
Re: Building a data center in a nuclear fallout shelter
#14Ok, everybody knows that the IT department should be located at the basement, but they went a bit too far. :p
Re: Building a data center in a nuclear fallout shelter
#15I work in telecom and this is fun to look at, but I bet I could take their facility off the net with 4 guys and two rented backhoes.
Awesome physical security is cool for customer tours (SwitchNAP Las Vegas, anyone?) but the real measure of redundancy is to what extreme you have 1+1 or N+1 everything for your support gear (cooling, generators, UPS, giant -48VDC battery plant, rectifiers, etc), and the layer 1 diversity of your fiber routes in and out of the facilities. And the diversity of the upstream carriers from your east/west/north/south fiber routes, the topology of how your dark fiber link out of the facility reaches the nearest major IX points.
Diversity of power feeds: Do they have redundant parallel A and B side high voltage electrical feeds coming from the local grid utility, fed from two separate geographically distinct substations? Really important datacenters in the US and Canada do.
On a facility side, something like this which is arched vaults underground will be a cooling system nightmare, driving up costs considerably vs. an aboveground structure where you can easily locate heat exhangers/cooling towers and free air cooling systems on concrete pads next to a box shaped building. There's ways to achieve up to 10kW/cabinet cooling density in that old buried bunker but it will be a lot costlier to do than in, for example, a retrofitted warehouse-like structure that was formerly a newspaper printing plant.
Re: Building a data center in a nuclear fallout shelter
#16I work in telecom and this is fun to look at, but I bet I could take their facility off the net with 4 guys and two rented backhoes. Awesome physical security is cool for customer tours (SwitchNAP Las Vegas, anyone?) but the real measure of redundancy is to what extreme you have 1+1 or N+1 everything for your support gear (cooling, generators, UPS, giant -48VDC battery plant, rectifiers, etc), and the layer 1 diversi…
While this is true for a high availability data center whose customers expect their website to be up 100% of the time, this article talks about storage infrastructure for their archiving service (C14). Restoring data from C14 will take multiple hours anyways, so networking downtime (or even power downtime, assuming they have enough backup power to safely power down their disks) will be of much lesser concern in the given use case than physical protection from natural or man-made disasters, which would destroy the archived data, or theft.
The main argument I would agree with is that it would maybe be cheaper (and definitely more secure) to keep data redundantly in two data centers sufficiently spread out to not be affected by a singular disaster than in a single hyper-secure data center.
Re: Building a data center in a nuclear fallout shelter
#17An ISP in Sweden has something similar https://twistedsifter.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/bahnhof-da...
If you're interested in a few more images of this place, the site I run has a few (sorry for the self-promotion): https://officesnapshots.com/2010/10/06/bahnhof-office/
Re: Building a data center in a nuclear fallout shelter
#18I work in telecom and this is fun to look at, but I bet I could take their facility off the net with 4 guys and two rented backhoes. Awesome physical security is cool for customer tours (SwitchNAP Las Vegas, anyone?) but the real measure of redundancy is to what extreme you have 1+1 or N+1 everything for your support gear (cooling, generators, UPS, giant -48VDC battery plant, rectifiers, etc), and the layer 1 diversi…
While this is true for a high availability data center whose customers expect their website to be up 100% of the time, this article talks about storage infrastructure for their archiving service (C14). Restoring data from C14 will take multiple hours anyways, so networking downtime (or even power downtime, assuming they have enough backup power to safely power down their disks) will be of much lesser concern in the g…
If you're building a relatively slow/cold storage archive datacenter I can think of a lot cheaper, less labor intensive ways to do it than retrofitting an underground bunker... I am assuming they either acquired the bunker for "free" or it has some purpose other than technical (marketing/sales/look how secure your data is!!!).
Re: Building a data center in a nuclear fallout shelter
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
While this is true for a high availability data center whose customers expect their website to be up 100% of the time, this article talks about storage infrastructure for their archiving service (C14). Restoring data from C14 will take multiple hours anyways, so networking downtime (or even power downtime, assuming they have enough backup power to safely power down their disks) will be of much lesser concern in the g…
If you're building a relatively slow/cold storage archive datacenter I can think of a lot cheaper, less labor intensive ways to do it than retrofitting an underground bunker... I am assuming they either acquired the bunker for "free" or it has some purpose other than technical (marketing/sales/look how secure your data is!!!).
Not to mention, a bunker in Paris. If it's not speed-critical, it should be off in some mountain or field not an urban center.
Re: Building a data center in a nuclear fallout shelter
#20The location on Google Maps is https://goo.gl/maps/1YNoyQPAKmy
Roughly 58 Boulevards des Maréchaux, 75015 Paris, France