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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."
"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?
If we all die from nuclear fallout who will reboot the NT servers?
Remember that you are unique, just like everybody else.
Never Underestimate The Power Of Human Stupidity.
Trapped in Time... Surrounded by Evil... Low on Gas.
I read the article. It is fine. Plenty of interesting points and all that jazz. However, I have the ask the obvious questions: Is it secure from hacking? Seriously. I read the article and it seems like a physically secure place, but is it secure electronically? From "real" attacks? From the kinds of attacks that happen all of the time?
(start sinister laugh)
I can just see some script kiddie taking the place down. That would be too funny.
(end sinister laugh)
How to Download YouTube Videos
Built initially to house currency, the Hostworks data centre in the suburb of Kidman Park, Adelaide is a tribute to the profligacy of Timothy Marcus Clark, [snip] Nestled in a semi-industrial area, with minimum road signage, it is at once unassuming, virtually impenetrable and to this day an inspirational feet of excess engineering.
Unassuming feet? What, size 5 1/2 D?
"And, of course, we spared no expense with our software, either: We installed the latest versions of IIS, Windows XP and Outlook on every machine in the datacenter to make absolutely sure that no one can get unauthorized access to anything on our servers! Everybody knows that software you pay a lot for is more secure than that free stuff. Microsoft says so!"
Get busy living or get busy dying. Carpe diem.
I would much rather have a data center that concentrates more on getting patches and other server-based security issues applied rather than chasing the very slim chance of a foreign invasion. I think it's more likely for someone to crack my colo than it is for a fire to melt it.
"The Ministry of Truth -- Minitrue, in Newspeak -- was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure..." [George Orwell, 1984]
Kinda scary.
We wave the flag of freedom as we conquer and invade.
Yeah, very nice. However if you're big enough to house servers there you should be big enough to have servers in multiple smaller/less available locations and have Akamai or some other internet wide distributed provider load balance between them.
Looks like a big basket to me. Would you put all your eggs there?
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
This is nice, but it protects a single point of failure. If you want to take these servers down, just attack the provider they depend on...
{{.sig}}
At first this seems almost like a joke. Who would invest this much time and energy into such a fortress just to house data? Well... banks for one. Imagine banks from around the world storing their data here in a highly encrypted form, updated at least daily. it would require alot of bandwith to say the least, but wouldn't that security be worth it to investors?
Less crucial information that needn't be updated regularly could find a home here at a discounted price. Take for example, building plans. Every city, county, and State in America has a plan somewhere for every building its ever built that lists (among other things) the locations of all wiring and plumbing. This isn't terribly confidential information (though it very well may become so for large buildings with a realistic threat of terrorist attacks) and could be modestly encrypted with read access only granted to the owner.
Copyright owners might be interested in it as a way of saving back-ups of their paper-work that cannot be destroyed by some freak accident.
I for one don't like these ideas because they represent too many eggs in one basket. When information security is required, it is my personal belief that having it stored in a known location that every hacker in the world would drool over to get inside is a bad idea. History has shown, however, that not everyone (indeed few people) listen to me.
Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
Remember the Maginot Line? Impregnable? How easy was it to get around that? Data is useful in direct proportion to its accessibility - cut the connections into this place and it's toast. No frontal attack necessary.
:)
Also, the article says they can expand capacity 300%. Frankly, that sounds like pretty short-term planning to me. In my experience, it's a rare data store that doesn't double in size every year or two.
Still, it sounds like a cool place, and probably has a better climate than Sealand
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
I was close to being in charge of a small-scale version of this concept last year (financing fell through) - we had the bunker/air raid shelter staked out and all. We were going to offer secure web hosting but mostly going for the off-site data backup and storage market - kinda like an underground Sealand, without the AAA. :-)
Money for nothing, pix for free
The article is pretty high level, but interesting none the less. I'm skeptical that is really as secure as they say it is. It would seem that any building which relies on outside connections would be vulnerable if those connections were cut. Not to mention that the air towers that were mentioned could be closed off, etc.
It seems to me that the best defence would be geographically distributed datacenters synced up on a regular basis. Of course you would have to deal with data syncing, and perhaps a master-slave relationship amongst the datacenters, but these are relatively simple problems to solve, compared to preparing for a nuclear or other attack...
Take care,
Brian
--
Only a few Free Palm m100's left...
--
... traditionally, data is not cracked by attacking its physical form. Kevin Mitnick :-) always said the easier way to get information was only some small and simple conversations with people who work where one wants to crack.
"So, where do you go on vacations? Are you married? What's your spouse's name? What's your favorite sports team? Any music style preferred?", etc...
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
Most 'good' datacenters have the same things. Multiple connections to power, water, electricity - good physical security et al. I've worked at and visited many datacenters, and nothing here outside of the ability to withstand explosives is all that different from anything else I've seen stateside. The big difference is that they're dumb enough to advertise it.
I'm glad ZDNet has the time to waste on stories like this. Physical security is nothing without a secure network to run in. All the `dead man zone's` in the world mean nothing if it isn't backed up on the network side by a good solid firewall.
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
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.
It's an impressive building designed to withstand all sorts of disaster movie ideas. So what?
As we've all seen time and time again the real threat to computer systems does not come in the form an earthquake, tidal wave, or random highjacked 767. The real threats rear their ugly heads when some idiot user doesn't update his M$Outlook security package, or takes his password out of the dictionary.
I'm not trying to say that physical threats to computer systems aren't important. By all means they are usually the last thing people think about. But the data here is only being protected from physcially being damaged and or lost. There's nothing in that article about firewall's, encryption, open access ports, faulty software, defective hardware, etcetera ad naseum.
The protection of data by the building is just one part of the problem of everything becoming digital. It's by no means the end all solution.
I read Slashdot for the
I don't care how secure they think it is. Give Danny Ocean three weeks and he'll get anything he wants from there.
(Or George Clooney, in a pinch. Yeah, I liked the movie. Cash vault, sure.)
Simple way to take down the site....
3 Letters.... E M P
Haha!!...
And as long as the dot-com boom continues to revolutionize the way we all shop, work, and live, these kinds of 99.999% reliable sites will be very important to us! Because there will be sites other than Amazon and Ebay that cannot withstand even an hour of down time without endangering the very existence of the companies with those sites!
The future lies in big buildings paying big money for big reliable redundant systems with big corporations paying big rent to make sure their big connectivity is almost permanent! Luckily the new pop-up ads will pay for it all!
Why, the only thing stopping people from getting to the completely-reliable sites located there is the fact that 99.99999999% of the routers on the net aren't in that building! But the last two nodes of any traceroute will be absolutely rock-solid! As long as there is some money left to pay bright, qualified network engineers, including 24x7 manned duty! Way to go!
(Phew. I didn't think I had a reserve of enough sarcasm to complete the post.)
This ladies and gentlemen makes perfect sence to me. There are just too many weaknesses in our communication fabric to justify this sort of protection for a simple server that relies of this very fabric.
I imagine that if the thought would occur to someone so prone to grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes, it has probably also occurred to the designers of the facility. I imagine also that they have taken steps to address this issue, and that most of their security is, in fact, not publicy documented.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
This sort of excess overspending and the lack of emphasis put on _real_ security (i.e. data security rather than physical security) ignores the vastly more likely threat to most company's web servers and database servers (and frankly that's what most of the boxen in these places are - huge rooms full of Yahoo and eBay machines). I'm not saying that a certain degree of security isn't appropriate, but withstanding foreign invasion? Please. The invaders are looking to break in with their armored brigade to the Exodus data center!!! Oh no!! Come on. A modest degree of armed guard presence, a low profile, some generators and massive UPS system - fine, this all makes sense. But you can go overboard.
Anyway, don't take my word for it. Just look at Exodus' stock. Their excesses seemed to ignore the fact that the service they provided just wasn't worth the outrageous amount of money they were charging for it, and these days, the more budget conscious hosting/data center/colo companies are the ones left standing.
"Doors throughout the complex are secured with a Honeywell Access Control System, and staff working at the facility are supplied with a proximity card."
US national labs rejected proximity cards years ago because they could be surreptitiously read out and cloned.
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
"...is built to survive the worst."
You got to be kidding. I don't think *anything* can survive the: "/. effect"
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
Here you go:
Pictures of Hostworks
Why aren't we told when editors moderate our posts?
I've been a customer at Exodus, and I've toured a number of other data center sites. The centers are generally designed to impress visitors - the "dead man zone" room being a perennial favorite - and to suggest a level of security that isn't truly there. There's a reason that the government doesn't build secure sites in the middle of an industrial park, yet that's often where you find colo/data centers. Also, the number of "sales prospects" triapsing through the data center should suggest that the true security level is lower than advertised.
As far as survivability goes, no matter how much work you put into the power, the redundant data lines, the physical security, there is no true survivability in a single site. (Look at 9/11 - how many WTC companies basically said "we'd have been dead if we didn't set up off-site disaster recovery after the '93 bomb"). Any single building can be disrupted by a determined attacker. You have to use multiple sites to be truly survivable (again, look at the Internet - the whole idea was a distributed, survivable network.
Wouldn't the best security (or at least pretty good) be to NOT advertise it on one of the most heavily trafficked sites on the net? I mean, if you want to physically destroy servers and the hardware that supports them, don't you need to know where they are? Thanks to ZD's article, now we and all other nefarious types know. Thanks John Dvorak! :)
"...bomb resistant..."
Notice that it does not say explosion resistant.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Well, the building seems as secure as anything I've ever heard of, but they never mention what their communication lines are. This is ok if they are primarily concerened with data safety (which they obviously are!), but this kinda falls down if they are trying to provide data accesibility (sp?). Of course, they might (probably?) have the standard fibre plus wireless and satellite. At least I would hope so, otherwise you just have this impenatrable mass in the middle of muck that can't move and can't talk to anyone, but you can't touch without getting your ass blown off.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Making a big, strong safehaven like this and telling everyone negates its effects. Telling everyone about how great your security is gives it a shorter lifetime than the completely not-scure (either from hacking or from "foreigh invasion") computer I'm using to type this. A shitload of physical defences and paranoid geeks are great for security, but not nearly so good as keeping a secret.
I say build it in the middle of a desert, six feet underground, under cover of night.
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
It's reassuring to know when the world is enduring The Apocalypse an outlet for pornagraphy will exist for future generations.
Amazingly, for a country originally populated by convicts, Australia seems to be outpacing the US for the honor of being the worst western country in terms of individual liberty (UK, US, AU...it's a three horse race I think). If it were me in that part of the world, I'd pick New Zealand. Unless I were serving AU-domestic customers specifically, I see no reason anyone would colo there; they might as well at least use the US where things are cheap.
Nice specifications, though. A single generator for on-site power is probably a bad idea, though, even with 2 substation feeds; any outage which could take down a substation could easily be system-wide, and some of those take a long time to restore. Witness the 9-11 situation where 111 8th and 60 Hudson (2 of the 3 important NYC carrier facilities) were on extended generators). 111 8th's generator 1) ran out of fuel 2) didn't start due to dust clogging the air filters. And powering up a 2MW diesel every 6 weeks for testing is also bad; should be done weekly or better.
I think it's rather telling that no one is building out bare colos like Exodus, Frontier GlobalCenter, etc. did back in the mid-1990s; there's a glut of raw space except in very specific markets. Managed services or differentiation (by security, expansion of over-capacity carrier hotels, low pricing, etc.), but not by massive up-front capital spending.
The real solution is to house the data in multiple facilities in different countries; and the only security focus should be on protecting the data from theft, not from destruction.
If someone really wants to blow up a builiding, they can do it. It is a lot harder if that building is only part of a redundant network.
The software development for this would be expensive, and performance would be modest, but highly secure, limited-purpose back-end systems would be far better than what we have now.
Designed as a southern Fort Knox, the structure is earthquake proof, bomb resistant, and provides anti ram capabilities.
From the movie Strange Days by James Cameron:
MACE
Take it easy. The glass is bullet resistant.
LENNY
Bullet resistant? Whatever happened to bullet proof?
But that's security through obscurity!!!!
They should publicly document all their security measures, using an open documentation license, so that everyone could examine the security for flaws!
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
A Beowulf Clus--aarrruugh!
/.'ers begins lynching him
Drops dead and dies as a mob of angry
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
While having your servers nice and secure in a physically impenetrable fortress is all very well and good, it's sort of the physical equivalent to cryptographic security-by-obscurity. It provides a false sense of security, and doesn't address critical vulnerabilities.
Let's face it - someone who wants to take your website down isn't going to do it by physically storming the building! Unless, of course, they're the government - in which case they'll also cut off your internet feed. What good is your 7-week's worth of diesel going to do you then?
Furthermore, it doesn't make any difference how physically secure your boxen are, if you're running an OS with networking vulnerabilities, or are vulnerable to DOS attacks.
The most secure solution is complete redundancy/distribution, in both physical and network space. The most obvious example is Freenet, which sadly isn't quite mainstream-useable yet.
Store your documents in a distributed fashion across thousands of machines. Encrypt them, so even the individual user doesn't know what his cache contains. Cryptographically sign each piece of content you produce. How is anyone going to fuck with your site when it's in a thousand different places?
Nothing here changes that.
So if Slashdot relocates to Australia, does that mean we can still rely on Slashdot to give us live up-to-date information as the country is being invaded and bombed back to the stone age?
/. effect?
More importantly, can it survive a DDoS?
Can it survive the
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
Build your datacenter as an 802.11 linked beowulf cluster mounted on the back of squirrels. Safe from everything but Hawks and Bicyclists.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I don't mean to be morbid, but from reading the article it seems clear that this building couldn't handle a fully fueled passenger jet being crashed into it.
It's all well and good to defend against those who want to steal, but beyond a certain point, you can't really defend against those who wish to destroy.
If you can't convince clients that it's worth the extra money to have all of this physical security, you can't make money.
In the midst of a global slowdown, are companies going to want to spend that extra money, rather than investing in distributed data warehousing approaches?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
(I guess that would have to be a pretty strong current, but how about those fictional (?) EMP bombs?)
Who says EMP bombs are fictional?
Winn Schwartau (sp?) covers this technology in medium depth in his book 'Information Warfare' (which is btw a VERY good book on Information terrorism and counter e.terrorism, as well as providing a good design for a closed cell architecture for terrorist oragnization. A MUST read in this day and age).
With a mediocre knowledge of Electrical Enigineering, one could pretty easily be constructed, or at the very least one could construct a powerful high energy radio frequency gun, with the proper power supply. It sounds like the facility is located in a fairly insdustrialized area, meaning that the power infrastructure to power it is probably already there to be hijacked.
There is always a way, and it doesn't always involve crashing a 767 into it *grin*.
>They answer to nobody
Oh, they'll answer to the United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Northern Ireland)
alright, just haven't been asked yet!
When she asks, she'll be asking nicely, with a cruiser and harriers just in case she gets the wrong answer.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Anyone else think this is teh 21st Century version of the Titanic?
It was built to secure the data of the world.
It was built to withstand natural disasters.
It was built to withstand armored assault.
One man would bring it down.
One man would free the information.
One man - Lord Legba!
Coming to a theater near you this summer.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Physical security--how quaint. Even if you greatly overengineer it, a widely distributed network of nodes using cryptographic techniques is likely to be much cheaper and no less secure. And it's also likely to be more resilient.
To pick a nit, you mean "security through obscurity", not obfuscation. Obscurity means "nobody knows it's there." Obfuscation is creating confusion.
I say build it in the middle of a desert, six feet underground, under cover of night.
To which I say, satellites can see in the dark (the better to watch your construction, my dear), and they can also see these sorts of facilities six feet underground from the rather notable heat signature. Keep in mind, even if the facility is properly cooled, all that heat has to go somewhere, and the bleedoff point will give away the operation. It's the same method employed to find military bunkers in the desert. When a satellite looks down and sees a heat plume coming from nowhere, it's short work to investigate why.
Virg
> I actually prefer Missile silos for ulitmate security.
Assuming you mean reusing old missle silos, it's a bad idea, for several reasons.
1.) The old silos were not designed to handle the electrical load that a datacenter requires.
2.) Missile silos are designed to protect against nuclear strike, but not much else. Foot soldiers would make short work of such facilities. Think heavier-than-air tear gas or burning jet fuel if you don't know why.
3.) Missile silos are generally full of asbestos and other nasty stuff that would be very costly to remove.
4.) Most missile silos have water leakage problems. This wasn't much of an issue when the only thing that got wet was the tail of the rocket booster, but computers are understandably less durable in such circumstances.
5.) Data connectivity was a non-concern then (they only needed a telephone, and then only until nuclear war began), so getting them wired would be prohibitive. Just about the only answer is satellite link, but that's not secure from destruction from the air.
6.) Missile silos were not siege-ready; that is, they didn't have weeks of supplies in case they were locked in. The assumption was that by the time they had a problem with supplies, the missile would have already launched.
Virg
> 3 Letters.... E M P
Two words in return: Faraday Cage. This deals with the big electromagnet as well. As for the junkyard magnet, you could just arrest or disable the crane operator before he could get it near the building.(bfg)
Virg
It matters *where* your redundancy is.
At least one firm in the World Trade Center had what they thought was a very safe backup procedure: Their data center in one tower was backed up to the second. In their minds anything that would take out *both* towers would obliterate Manhattan, and therefore was considered too remote to worry about...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
I remember about 10 years back taking a tour of a major financial institutions data centre based in Edinburgh, (Scotland). The place had been built for mainframes, but they were in the middle of replacing them with a "more modern" client server paradigm (I'm spending _far_ too much time listening to my boss!). This meant that they had collosally huge rooms, chilled to about 10 degrees C, virtually empty.
There were essentially two data centres in one building, each with its own exceptionally large UPS system with rooms full of wet-cell batteries, and each with two backup generators. Naturally there were separate power feeds into the building (three separate sub-stations if memory serves). The most memorable part tho' was walking through the separating wall - 10 feet thick re-inforced concrete which, we were told, had been designed to withstand an impact from a 747. They were under the local airports flightpath - an airport whose runways will never take a 747, but anyway. The wall runs diagonally to the flightpath, but if it lands right on top they've still lost the facility.
The thing that always strikes me about all these types of centres is that they seem to ignore (or just don't talk about) the human factor. Most disaster recovery plans are just as bad. Picture the scenario - half of your facility has just been taken out by some disaster, you probably just lost half of your collegues. I won't describe the scene, but you can imagine what horrors might be going on on the other side of the 10 foot concrete wall from you - how well will the average person be able to cope emotionally, never mind how well they'll be able to do their job? I imagine a lot of people simply wouldn't be able to face coming into work in those situations.
All that said of course, from what I hear those who survived the WTC proved me wrong, but then they were making a stand against the terrorists, and I really admire that. What if though, for the sake of this scenario, the disaster had been caused by human error, natural disaster or whatever. How would people have coped and done their jobs under those circumstances. I think a lot more people would have refused to come into work, even in the disaster recovery site, and those that did would probably have been a lot more distracted and lack motivation, at least once the immediate response to the disaster was over.
Stealing a rhinoceros should not be attempted lightly.
Random Anecdote:
In Tsutomu Shimomura's book Takedown (about the hunting and capturing of Kevin Mitnick), Shimomura describes how a snow plow would constantly sever wires running between the trailer he had his computer in and the data center next door. His solution was to wrap super strong kevlar cable around the the vulnerable data cable. This solution worked a little too well-- the snow plow caught the kevlar cable, and indeed it did not break and neither did the data cable; instead the snow plow ended up pulling off the entire side of the trailer the kevlar cable was attached to!
Okay, good structure, check.
Anyone remember what happened to CNN, MSNBC, etc. after the WTC thing? The sheer number of accesses brought them right down. It was a perfect testament to the fragility of the Web. This ought to be addressed as well; we may not always have Google's famous cache to fall back on.
The coolest voice ever.
My issue with the Hostworks facility is that it's designed to handle physical currency, not data. You can fit a hell of a lot more electronic currency in 1 square foot than you could ever fit physical currency.
The Amadeus Data Processing Facility (aka the ADP [no relation to the ADP you see on your paychecks]) in Erding Germany is the Fort Knox of data facilities. It's designed to not only protect the servers physically, but to also protect the transactions within the facility
Amadeus is the European equivalent of Sabre in the US. They have roughly a 90% market share of the European market, 10% of the US, and a lot of the rest of the world to boot.
Their facilities are oriented towards traditional transaction processing systems (Tandem/Himalaya machines) rather than "normal" servers. While there is overlap in methodology there are a *lot* of differences. For the most part, they manage all the machines.
This facility supports all of the Amadeus traffic (both queries and bookings for hotels, cruises, airlines, car rentals, even travel insurance.), as well as the data processing for a number of international airlines (British Airways is one), and supposedly several international banks as well.
The facility is oriented around (roughly triangular) firecells, of which there are 3 for machines. These are massively over built. They were originally designing for hundreds of mainframe style machines, and (literally) tons of copper cabling in each firecell.
Each primary walkway is secured at multiple points. You're escorted at all times by a guard who doesn't have the ability to open any doors. Doors can only be opened by a guard remotely. At every point a guard can verify what he's seeing on the camera by direct visual observation.
Cooling is completely isolated from electrical which is completely isolated from network cabling which is completely isolated from the machines. Machines are the at the center of the firecells with corridors for cooling, electrical, and other support systems surrounding it. Each of the corridors is physically secure from all of the others.
ADP has enough generator power to run the entire town of Erding in the event that Erding loses it's main power source(s). Rumor has it that this has happened on numerous occasions.
Geographically isolated in a "easily defensible location". (One of those comments that kinda sticks in your mind when you hear it)
If they don't know you're coming you are stopped by armed guards before you're in sight of the building.
There is a No-Fly zone around their facility. (How this is enforced I don't know...)
Every Tandem is actively mirrored by another in a seperate firecell on a seperate floor. If your Tandem in cell-1 floor-2 goes away, the mirror in cell-3 floor-1 keeps the transaction from being lost.
The list goes on and on. Someone out there in the /. universe has to have heard of this facility and can probably fill in or correct details, but the Hostworks facility is by no means truly unique.
Karma: 0 (But I wield a mean +10 Vorpal Apathy)
There are some kind of applications that work fine in isolation, and if this is one of them, cool. But most real-world businesses need to be connected to the rest of the world - either the Internet, or privatge networks (e.g. bank data centers talking to ATMs). The article doesn't mention physically redundant communications, though I assume they probably did use a fiber ring of some sort, which means it takes *two* backhoe hits before they're off the net and not just one. But if they're this paranoid, and not just hyping themselves, they need some radio or satellite connectivity, enough voice diversity (or cell phones) so they can talk if their phone connection gets cut, and ideally geographical diversity so that if something does go seriously wrong (flood, earthquake, etc.) they can run from their other location.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The 2100 Lb B43 is no longer in the US arsenal, having been replaced by the 2400 lb B83. Perhaps you have the weight confused with the 10,000 lb B41, which had a much higher yield.
Firstly, I can find no evidence of a M110 bomb existing, other than one-line entries in copy/pasted lists on free hosting sites.
Secondly, the only aircraft capable of lifting and dropping a 7.5 ton Daisy Cutter is a C-130 (a B-52H's bomb racks aren't built to hold anything that big). This is enough to make me doubt the existance of a 11 ton bomb, which would require aircraft specially modified to handle it.
On this point, you're quite right. Getting a 20 ton yield out of conventional explosives is going to require a big bomb.
But then again, I could be wrong.
"Remember thealamo.com!"
Seriously, though..
I am missing something here. What are you referencing to? If i go to thealamo.com i arrive at some hotel/casino. google only find advertisements.
please explain.