
Swiss Fort Knox - High secure data center inside the Swiss Alps - FredericJ
http://www.swissfortknox.com/infografik.html
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roel_v
During the previous .com craze (2000-ish), I was at a Mercedes data center
around Munich that was build in a former WWII bunker. The allies, when they
captured it, decided against blowing it up because (according to our guide at
the time), blowing it up would take so much explosives that it would leave a
several-kilometer large crater and destroy all glass windows for 10's of
kilometers around. They had some pictures of how (during the conversion to
data center) they used wire saws ten of meters long to saw through the 5
meters of concrete thick walls. Pretty impressive.

That said, it seemed like the thick walls were more of a sales gimmick than
actually being useful. Whether a wall is 10 or 5000 cm of concrete, no burglar
will get through; and when there really is a nuclear war going on, the safety
of the servers of the majority of companies in there wouldn't matter a bit.

~~~
tombrossman
We've got loads of German bunkers here in Jersey and I often think of what
else they could be used for. Our neighbour has converted one to a totally
soundproof media room, for example. The larger ones are of historic value and
are being restored, but there are some good reasons to use the medium-sized
ones for server rooms.

The temperature is naturally very cool inside, and they all have superb
ventilation due to the air filters installed in case of chemical attack
(Hitler was gassed in WW1 and so obsessed with gas locks & ventilation).

Physical security, that's obvious. Even those that were partially destroyed
after the war were made safe by pouring more concrete to re-seal them.

A highly-interconnected island with Gigabit broadband and multiple links to
the UK & France.

Hey, if anyone is interested in building 'Data Bunkers' this is a damn good
place to start. The local government is pretty business friendly, too.

~~~
raverbashing
Jersey => Channel Island, correct?

~~~
tombrossman
Yes, we are right off the French coast.

Here's some background on the WW2 history:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Channel_Isla...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Channel_Islands)

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atonse
I love that so many of my favorite James Bond fantasies are coming to life
nowadays, with a modern, internet twist!

Where's the room where you can sit and stroke the cat on your lap?

~~~
walshemj
I realy realy want the facilities staff to have color coordinated jumpsuit
uniforms and hard hats.

Red for security guards of course :-)

Do you think equipping them with Mp40's would be going to far.

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Luc
It seems strange to me that they piggybacked on the Fort Knox 'brand'. Now if
something untoward happens at Fort Knox, their brand is impacted too.

Seems like a missed opportunity to make the most of the aura of quality that
'Swiss' has (I like 'Swiss Fort' better).

~~~
oh_sigh
What is going to happen to Fort Knox? Is a madman going to blow up a nuclear
bomb inside of it, irradiating the gold for thousands of years?

~~~
Luc
Ok, you're right, it's far fetched.

Fort Knox is a huge place though. I was thinking along the lines of a guy
going on a shooting spree or something. The Fort Knox child massacre, that
kind of thing. Very very unlikely I guess. Or someone starts up a Fort Knox
site on Tor, and in the end lots of people get scammed.

It just seems incongruous to me to have a bunker in the Swiss Alps, more or
less the pinnacle of safety, and then call it after something on the other
side of the world.

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jonlucc
Is physical security that big of a problem to solve? I think the more pressing
issue would be attacks through their nice data connection.

~~~
FredericJ
As long as cold boot attacks are an issue, physical security is a big win.

But promising research might make it a thing of the past.
[http://privatecore.com/vcage/](http://privatecore.com/vcage/)

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dexcs
A more detailed article about it:
[http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2010/11/features/20-...](http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2010/11/features/20-thousand-
terabytes-under-the-ground)

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pasbesoin
So, if I may ask, for the small time host, where and with whom do people
consider things to be... "reasonably" secure?

I'm less concerned about catastrophic physical destruction than I am about
e.g. the Swiss equivalent of a national security letter / remit /warrant /
whatever. Physical security _is_ nice with respect to securing the physical
hardware from unwanted access.

I used to manage a site that did nothing nefarious, but that did accumulate
some rather personal discussions.

As I've considered whether to do so again, I've wondered where the hey I would
/ should host it, these days.

We always policed fairly strongly, including to e.g. removing copy/pastes of
full news articles. The place was never about "law breaking". But I _don 't_
want to facilitate Agency X, BigCo Y, or SocialScum Z in their efforts to
flesh out personal profiles from the server end, nor to throttle "reasonable"
conversation.

I suppose the answer is "nowhere", these days. But maybe there is still a
relatively "next best thing".

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JimmaDaRustla
NSA now deciding where they can place a splitter...

~~~
jonlucc
I'm guessing they're already on the client list.

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appplemac
Looks like a really nice place for a bank vault, yes. But does physical
security matter _that_ much for the IT sector? If so, these ridiculous
security measures are worth nothing if not accompanied by very, _very_ heavy
digital security solutions.

P.S. Why didn't they start a bank in there? Is banking too mainstream already?

~~~
Xylakant
Does physical security of bank vaults still matter that much nowadays? Most of
your money is stored in bits and that applies to the super-wealthy at least as
much as for the mere mortals. It's certainly still important, but the "we'll
steal tons of gold and valuable papers" is probably getting old.

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michaelgrafl
The client I work for has his servers in this thing, and I'll probably get to
visit it soon. I'd rather they had a whisky bar and a place to smoke cigars
installed somewhere in there.

Still, looking forward to seeing it for myself.

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prayerslayer
One of my professors told us that UBS mirrors its whole data center to another
one located in a mountain. Does anybody know if it's this particular thing? Or
are there more than one of this?

~~~
chrisboesing
From the Wired[0] article posted above[1]:

"Oschwald[Co-Founder of Swiss Fort Knox] can tick off blue-chip companies such
as Cisco Systems, Novartis, UBS and Deutsche Bank among his clients."

[0]:
[http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2010/11/features/20-...](http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2010/11/features/20-thousand-
terabytes-under-the-ground) [1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6612298](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6612298)

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Theodores
This looks to me like bin Laden's Mountain Fortress, the one Donald Rumsfeld
told us about:

[http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2011/05/bin...](http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2011/05/bin_ladens_fict.html)

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neals
Man, I love the style of this image. Anybody know a collection of these kind
of images?

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bostonpete
Looks like something out of Cryptonomicon.

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conductr
Good marketing gimmick for security....the things enterprise solutions are
made of

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duiker101
"Sabotage proof, high-performance cooling system"

"Uninterruptible power supply"

Yhea....

