http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/11/14/the-worlds-most-super-designed-data-center-fit-for-a-james-bond-villain/
(No, I don't know if it's real or not.)
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
It is.
The server space is outside the blastproof area. Go figure.
Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/11/14/the-worlds-most-super-designed-data-center-fit-for-a-james-bond-villain/
(No, I don't know if it's real or not.)
more images:
cheers,
raoul
One could consider purchasing the underground tunnels
in downtown London that BT is selling to build a
competing "over-the-top" data center.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/28/business/worldbusiness/28tunnel.html
That's a "below the surface" datacenter, innit?
srs (ok, I'll get my coat)
Buhrmaster, Gary wrote:
From: Steven M. Bellovin [mailto:smb@cs.columbia.edu]
Sent: Friday, November 28, 2008 5:35 AM
To: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: an over-the-top data centerhttp://royal.pingdom.com/2008/11/14/the-worlds-most-super-desi
gned-data-center-fit-for-a-james-bond-villain/
(No, I don't know if it's real or not.)One could consider purchasing the underground tunnels
in downtown London that BT is selling to build a
competing "over-the-top" data center.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/28/business/worldbusiness/28tunnel.html
It seems that all these cases are more under the bottom than over the top.
Every couple of years there is a story about some anti virus company, data center, or whatever running out of an old nuclear bunker/military base/middle of no where. It is exciting the first few times.
Gadi.
I recall visiting something of this sort a couple
years back..
On a related noted, some have professed that adapting old
ships into data centers would provide eco-friendly secure
data center solutions. I wonder if "pirates" were listed
anywhere in their business plan...
-danny
Your data connection to shore is going to be tenuous at best. One good blow strong enough to make you drag anchor and you kiss goodbye your fibre trunk connection. Putting that back in service is a bit more than a four hour splice job.
An alternative would be to run a microwave link to shore, but I'm not sure I would want to bet the farm on the mechanics necessary to keep the dish aligned.
And what do you do when it's time to haul out and paint the bottom?!?
Then there is the matter of power. It wouldn't be very hard to DOS the entire operation by taking out the fuel barges.
I suppose you could permanently tie up to a pier, but at that point you're just a building with a leaky basement. I don't see how anyone could claim this is more secure than a purpose-built data centre. (And even at anchor, how do you stop someone from taking you out with something as simple as a drill?)
--lyndon (mailing via Wimax from S/V Bandido I, at the dock in Vancouver 
Not if the ship is literally encased in concrete at the shore. Which solves all your other problems as well.
There are even examples of actual free-floating ships which have been stable for a decade or more. See the floating casinos in Louisiana, which have been hit by hurricanes, and are still attached to shore by electricity, bits, and physically.
Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
Not if the ship is literally encased in concrete at the shore. Which solves all your other problems as well.
But that's not a ship, it's a building.
There are even examples of actual free-floating ships which have been stable for a decade or more.
And many counter-examples.
--lyndon
You mean something akin to Sealand's HavenCo? Yes, I know that's an old fort,
and not a ship, but a similar concept at least.
HavenCo, which ran a datacenter on the "nation" of Sealand, is
no longer operating there:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/25/havenco/
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
HavenCo, which ran a datacenter on the "nation" of Sealand, is
no longer operating there:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/25/havenco/--Steve Bellovin, Steven M. Bellovin
If you do a bit more research on that one, it never got to a serious point. They had one 802.11b onto the platform and never got very far with it. No fiber and no redundancy.
However the idea was a bit of a novelty, because it's claimed to be sovereign territory.
Kind regards,
Martin List-Petersen
Which is the same story for most (if not all) of these hype-driven
"bullet-proof" data centers.
I recall a .com CEO espousing the capabilities of his
datacenter-inside-an-old-bank-vault to prevent DoS attacks such as the
one that had hit Yahoo! the week before. I must say that the
provided dinner, drinks and Hummer Limo ride, to the DC, made the
humor of the CEO more enjoyable. Sadly a lot of older pensioners
were eating his every word. At that time I worked for an
equipment/services reseller and I persisted quietly, as best I could,
to save some people's life savings. I felt like a diver witnessing a
herring infused shark fest.
-Jim P.
Which shows how well the concept works; which is why I mentioned it....
Apologies to the list.
I didn't know whether to fork this into a couple of replies, or just run with it. I chose the latter.
1) This datacenter is only 12,000 sq ft. (submessage: who cares?)
2) The generators are underground. A leak in their exhaust system kills everyone -- worse, a leak in their fuel tank or filler lines (when being filled from above) could do the same. Yes, you could address this with alarms (provided they work and are tested, etc).
3) No one cares if the server farm is blast proof (it isn't), if the connectivity in/out of it gets blasted (submessage: silos were meant to deliver one thing, datacenters aren't in the same operational model once they need connectivity to the outside world)
4) With all of that fog and plant life, I wonder how they critically manage humidity. [Or if they even do].
Hey I'll defend the interest in this one. They at least have cool architecture.
And to all the folks debating the form of security, let me also remind that massive redundancy always provides even more security than one very, very, hard point.
cheers,
--dr
It's much easier to restore fiber connectivity in a time of crisis than it is to source hardware manufacturered at the other end of the world and have this set up properly. I do think there is value in keeping the hw safer than the connectivity to the outside.
I bet the military or emergency services can establish a 10km fiber stretch in a few hours. Replacing some telecom hw and set it up from scratch would probably take weeks (I'm not talking about a single router here).