
Building a data center in a nuclear fallout shelter - Remiii
https://blog.online.net/2016/08/23/c14-story-part-1-meet-our-nuclear-fallout-shelter/
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walrus01
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.

~~~
ar0
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.

~~~
walrus01
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!!!).

~~~
nickparker
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.

~~~
walrus01
And isn't electricity in Paris something like 18 euro cents per kWh? Now your
datacenter is eating expensive electricity and requires special expensive
cooling systems all year round, because even in the middle of winter there's
no easy way to do free-air cooling of an underground bunker.

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Shalle135
An ISP in Sweden has something similar
[https://twistedsifter.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/bahnhof-
da...](https://twistedsifter.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/bahnhof-data-center-
isp-in-former-nuclear-bunker-from-cold-war-stockholm-sweden-6.jpg?w=800&h=586)

~~~
stevesearer
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/](https://officesnapshots.com/2010/10/06/bahnhof-office/)

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mikeash
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.

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dogma1138
I think OWSAP needs to update its DDoS vectors to include "HN front page
listing".

~~~
cuonic
Pretty disappointing for a web host offering secure and reliable storage to
have their blog taken down so easily.

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firethief
> 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.

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kbrosnan
The location on Google Maps is
[https://goo.gl/maps/1YNoyQPAKmy](https://goo.gl/maps/1YNoyQPAKmy)

Roughly 58 Boulevards des Maréchaux, 75015 Paris, France

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finnh
google cache:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YJOLQe...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YJOLQeKNPYcJ:https://blog.online.net/2016/08/23/c14-story-
part-1-meet-our-nuclear-fallout-shelter/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

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andmarios
Ok, everybody knows that the IT department should be located at the basement,
but they went a bit too far. :p

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coldcode
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.

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brudgers
Site appears to be struggling to serve images at 13:16 UTC

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LaurentGh
It's down or super slow :(

~~~
Remiii
It's up again ;-)

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jchampem
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?

~~~
dang
Ok, we've edited the title.

~~~
Remiii
THX

