I 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.
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.
This is something of a nitpick, but they really ought to refer to it as a nuclear bunker, not a fallout shelter. A fallout shelter is just something that can shield people from fallout radiation. You need thickish walls but nothing too special. Some places in the US you can still see the "fallout shelter" sign on schools and such. However, it doesn't offer much protection from a nuclear blast. The intent is that the survivors of a near miss would stay in fallout shelters for a few days after the explosion to wait out the worst of the radiation.
It sounds like this thing is a purpose-built bunker built to withstand a nuclear explosion, so much more robust than the title would imply, at least to me.
The SABRE reservation system is located in Tulsa in a nuclear-hardened bunker (on a former AF base). The joke is in the event of a nuclear war you could still get a airline reservation.
The title of the post is not really clear.. Maybe it should state that they are building a datacenter in a Nuclear Fallout Shelter in the middle of Paris?
[+] [-] walrus01|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ar0|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Shalle135|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevesearer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rwmj|9 years ago|reply
http://www.thebunker.net/about-us/
Earliest Internet Archive mirror from 2000: https://web.archive.org/web/20000302134946/http://www.thebun...
It was a silly gimmick then, and it's a silly gimmick now.
[+] [-] mikeash|9 years ago|reply
It sounds like this thing is a purpose-built bunker built to withstand a nuclear explosion, so much more robust than the title would imply, at least to me.
[+] [-] dogma1138|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cuonic|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] firethief|9 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] kbrosnan|9 years ago|reply
Roughly 58 Boulevards des Maréchaux, 75015 Paris, France
[+] [-] finnh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andmarios|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldcode|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brudgers|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LaurentGh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Remiii|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jchampem|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Remiii|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|9 years ago|reply