Escape from Data Alcatraz

nihilist_1137 writes "Zdnet is reporting on a new information facility that is built to surive the worst.Triangular in shape, two of the sides house offices while the third, a large rectangular block if taken in isolation, contains two data centres, as well as the infrastructure to ensure that Web sites continue to function come fire, flood, natural catastrophy or foreign invasion."

Comments

Foreign Invasion?

[InfinityWpi]

"Remember thealamo.com!"

Seriously, though... you're saying they can stand up to repeated shelling by artillery? Or infantry-placed demo charges? Or anything else an invading force is likely to have?

WHY????

If you're being invaded, you've got more important things to worry about than if your company's web site will stay up!

The other half of this is: What if the invasion is an invasion of illegal immigrant workers? Can this thing survive having a janitor who's been slipped a hundred bucks (three weeks pay) to pull out a wire here and there?

Re:Foreign Invasion?

[ZPO]

Simply from the physical construction and security perspective:

EXTERNAL---

1 - Parking lot is too close to the building (a reasonably sized car/truck device could do serious structural damage.

2 - "ram proof"??? Not hardly. I don't see a double berm system. Some of those nice decorative tree planters that are actually 2 foot thick reinforced concrete might help

3 - No view of the perimeter. Does it have a ditch, double fence line, k-rails to require a zigzag entrance.

(plenty more)

INTERNEL ---

1 - From what I can see all conduits are directly attached to unistrut on the ceilings. Big problem if you take a good shock to the building (ie - it's rigid)

2 - Equipment is not isolated by springs/rubber mounts from the floor. Same shock damage possibilities as above.

3 - No water collection trough around the sides of each room. I don't see floor water sensors either.

4 - Water drip pans under all chilled water and condensate lines.

5 - *1* generator? For the cost of the facility it would have been a pittance to go with two and have full redundancy when running on local generation.

All in all it's a decently engineered place. It just needs the final touches...

Cheap geographical redundancy, not $$$ gimmicks

[EaglesNest]

When I worked the overnight shift at one of Qwest's many hosting centers, I loved to give early-morining tours. We'd impress everyone with all our layers of redundancy. The more expensive a system, the more impressed our tourists would be with it. Still, having three different diesal engines - each the the size of a locamotive, or having triple UPS protection, or dry localized fire-retardent, or triple redundant air conditioning and filtering, or three different OC-48 lines isn't the most important thing about redundancy.

By far, the cheapest and most effective method of redundant systems is to just safe your money and not buy fancy equipment for one place, but to spend it on cheap equipment is several places. That way, who cares if someone takes out an entire hosting center, leaving only a 100 ft dep crater. You still have servers running in California and Asia.

The Domain Name System doesn't rely on a huge Fort Knox-like system. It simply has 13 (?) different places throughout the world where amazingly cheap (for its importance) equipment resides. Even if North America sinks to the bottom of the Ocean, DNS should still happily resolve.

Expensive (but impressive) measures are not the answer to reliability. Geographic diversity of cheap systems is the answer most most applications. Today, we have incremental transfer protocols such as rsync that will even transfer massive databases back and forth by only sending the changes. It's largely marketing, unwarrented by technical considerations, that make companies spend so much money on these extra sigmas of reliability.