Slashdot Mirror
Data Centers in Strange Places
johannacw writes "Would you house a data center in a diamond mine or an old chapel? These organizations did, with great success; many of these facilities offer the latest in cooling and energy technology, among other advances. 'If you want an even more hardened environment for your data, you might look at the aptly named InfoBunker in Boone, Iowa, about an hour outside Des Moines. [...] The 65,000-square-foot, five-story site is dug deep into the ground. No one gets in without passing though the 4.5-ton steel door and then a three-step process. A scanner uses radio frequency to read the would-be entrant's skin as a biometric identifier. He then needs to use a keycard and enter a code on the keypad. This three-tier security is standard for high-level military installations, McGinnis explains.'"
Why would I want to physically access my botnet?
Would you house a data center in a diamond mine or an old chapel?
Only if I had enough bunk space for my horde of minions, but yes, probably.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I mean, honestly, is it just me or are all these "exotic" data centers just a way to boost your CIOs ego at gatherings? Is it really necessary to have military security? Do your competitors care that much? Furthermore, would they be willing to risk criminal charges to try and steal a few thousand hard drives full of potentially useless data?
Basements with backup power, secured doors, & a good fire system in my opinion. Then again, I'm not a CIO. Once I become one though, well, I imagine MY data center will have a golf course. And blackjack. And possibly hookers.
"...dug deep into the ground. No one gets in without passing though the 4.5-ton steel door and then a three-step process." Sounds almost secure enough to hide my porn collection.
"No one gets in without passing though the 4.5-ton steel door and then a three-step process." Sounds like a lot of women I know.
Once I become one though, well, I imagine MY data center will have a golf course. And blackjack. And possibly hookers.
And don't forget the full stock of Olde Fortran malt liquor.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
And then after all that security, they just let the guy plug some random floppy disk into one of the computers...
Where else are they going to contain the evil emanating from the server hosting goatse?
So, they are paying Google royalties for the technology which Google invented, right?
If I were a CIO, I'd turn the moon into a gigantic data centre.
Cold? Check. Solar-power ready? Check. Visible from earth so that everyone can see my giant penis^H^H^H^H^H data-centre? CHECK.
What is is all that is. Isn't that obvious?
What, like the back of a Volkswagen?
The IRS is the one organization that you don't want to fuck with. Remember, these are the guys who took down Al Capone.
...would most likely yeild to the desire of my newly welcome, diamond encrusted, chapel dwelling overlords, and place their beowulf cluster wherever they see fit.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
You bribe the people who work in the place.
Deleted
The best data center I've seen is an un-named co-lo company in Canada who has their operations on the top floor of a mall in what used to be movie theaters.
The escalators go up to the floor and promptly end at a wall. A one way mirror hides an RFID reader which 'open sesame' style activates the wall to move and let you in.
No signs, or outward indications as to it being there. Lotsa space, redundant everything and all hiding in plain sight. It was pretty cool.
Where are we going, and why are we in this hand cart?
I would tell you, but then I would have to kill you.
and beat the dogs and cheat the cold electronic eyes
and if you make it past the shotgun in the hall
dial the combination open the priesthole...
There's frikken sharks with laser beams!!!
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
From your good pal toqer :)
http://www.infobunker.com/. Ask for Chaz and tell him toqer sent ya.
For those who don't know... there are three essential methods of identifying someone:
1. What you are. (Iris scan, biometric readings, fingerprints, etc.)
2. What you have. (ID card, USB flash drive, random number security key, etc.)
3. What you know. (Password, etc.)
You are going to see a lot more systems use a "two out of three" approach. I actually thought, at one point, that this was going to be a requirement for Vista. I guess not.
The system in TFA requires all three: what you are, what you know, what you have. While requiring three out of three might seem a little nuts, it will seem less nuts in a few years when everyone has to have at least two out of three in order to do basic things like log onto their computer.
tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
It IS a Vista requirement.
There - fixed it for you.
Kevin Smith on Prince
Forget patches, this is how Microsoft is going to make Windows Server and IIS secure...
-Matthew Riley "TofuMatt" MacPherson
I have a website
Disasters come in many forms. Having more than one center is probably more important than extreme security at one site.
The sites should be separated by physical distance and political jurisdictions. Data lost isn't limited to physical problems. It can come in the form of a legal scavenger hunt. Both can put you out of business.
It's good to see those old Titan missile silos being put to good use!
You know. The ritual sacrifice of chickens & goats required to keep the Windows servers operating normally.
Deleted
Considering there could be an 'On site' issue with the data center that can only be fixed by you personally.
Screw latency, I'm talking free trip to the moon!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How long shall we keep falling into the same error time after time thinking that human nature is basically good? The kind of data that appears to need such security is the kind that (1) is produced by the everyday lives of people, (2) of which people have little or no knowledge and/or of which they do not care (to their own peril), and (3) that can (read: will) be used against them for for whatever purposes including but not limited to the political.
Cynicism is merely a secular expression of a non-secular principle.
Economic liberty without political liberty is a mockery of both.
Submission as evidence constitutes plaintiff and/or prosecutorial misconduct.
Skynet survives the nuclear first strike...
I wonder why someone hasn't thought of using a abandon missile silo as a data center.
I may not be a smart man, but I know what an inode is.
"Also on-site are a 16,000-gallon water supply for fire suppression"
not sure i want that in my datacenter...
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
Basically, yes, they're there to boost some manager's ego. I haven't even heard of a recent data loss or theft that involved a team of ninjas breaking in and stealing hard drives. The ones I did hear about, offhand, involved stuff like:
- pissed off admin exports the customer database and sells it to a spammer
- a hired rent-a-coder working at home is given an export of the fucking productive database, just so he can work out the report formatting. So he asks for help in a forum and attaches a zip file of said productive database. Just so, you know, others can try their hand at formatting that data too. (And if you think that's a one-off thing, at a recent consulting job I've seen exactly that happen, with the dumbass PHB's blessing. They exported the productive database, installed it on a test machine, then let the external contractor -- not me, but the guy whose neverending mess I was supposed to help fix -- copy it all on his private laptop too. And since he was not supposed to connect an external laptop to the internal network, the PHB cheerfully supplied an USB stick to transfer the data with. Made me cringe. But, hey, he was cheaper than doing it in-house.)
- productive data, complete with customer names and personal data, is copied on some salesman's laptop, because god forbid that you inconvenience the sales guys in the least bit, even by making them log in to a web site. Plus, I'm sure he thinks he's a wizard with Excel and God knows what ad-hoc graphs and reports he might need to generate on the spot from that data. Then said laptop is forgotten on the airport or stolen. (I can remember a dozen or so instances of this in the news without even googling.)
- social engineering and/or lax security standards (As an extreme case, I've actually worked for a dot-com back in the day, who told their 1st level support to give anyone an admin account who calls in and asks for one. It's easier than just creating one for the regional managers -- although I'd debate whether those need one in the first place. Nah, just tell them to phone in and ask for one. Eventually after a year they realized that they have a few thousand admin accounts and nobody knows who those people are.)
- pwned machines on the internal network that haven't been patched since Jurassic. I remember one touching story about IIRC Slammer, where a company got hit hard because they were running with completely unpatched workstations, since apparently installing any service pack broke one of the internal applications they were using. And, of course, they'd rather save money than fix the stupid application.
- pwned machines on the internal network because some dumbass PHB or marketter figured out (or bribed an engineer for the knowledge) how to open a tunnel from inside to his home machine and leave it on, so he can access the company network from home. So when his unprotected, crapware-ladden home machine got pwned, it was connected to the intranet.
- pwned machines on the internal network because just about anyone is allowed to plug their laptop in
The last three are especially nice if everything is one big network zone.
- pwned machines because some dumbass programmer would rather argue that SQL-injection and cross-site-scripting are just hype, instead of fixing his freakin' application. I'm still suprised at the number of people who don't even know how to quote a string for use in a web page or in the database. Or better yet, to use prepared statements and/or some template/framework that handles that kind of thing for you. And, yes, I remember at least one article linked even on Slashdot where the idiot was arguing that cross-site-scripting vulnerabilities are inevitable and harmless.
- pwnage via any of the above methods (including social engineering or dishonest employees) because noone bothered setting productive database passwords more creative than the same as the app name, and/or using more than one account for a whole department. Or indeed for the whole company. It's too much work
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
File server, print server, dual tape loaders, UPS, all setting on shelves, mounted above the level a suspended ceiling, with a mirrored fail-over setup at the opposite side of the building, also above ceiling-level.
It was a medical office and they were floor-space constrained so 'going up' seemed the logical solution (there was an absurd amount of space up there.) They'd had the electrician in to put outlets up there, the shelves were reinforced and had a lip added so nothing accidentally slid off (there was even a strap with a buckle to make sure nothing ever dropped down.) The hardest part was lifting the hardware up into place.
It was a complete "you've got to be kidding!" scenario when I first saw it, but I had to admit for a crazy location it was a sweet setup and worked great for their needs.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Pseudo-security is a bad thing, because it gets people to let their guard down. When they think that some magical talisman they bought (or in this case a bunker) makes the server super-extra-uber-secure, then the next thing that happens is that they cut the funding for real security.
Think of the dot-com era, really. How many times have you heard companies going "we're secure because we use 128 bit HTTPS! See that padlock icon? It means we're secure!" and then they forgot to check rights in their web site and/or just leave internal files around in the web server's directories or on some public FTP directory? Or leave their web server, some active ftp daemon, and God knows what else run with the default admin password? I can think of a couple which cheerfully left text files with user data and credit card numbers available for everyone. But, hey, they have 128 bit HTTPS, so they're secure.
Or I know of at least one corporation which bought all sorts of expensive appliances to scan all JMS messages and SQL statements for malicious stuff... but then noone actually configured rules for those. They used them effectively as some magical talisman that makes them secure just by being there, no extra work required. And some of them were bogus talismans anyway, pure snake oil that couldn't even have done the job right.
_That_ is the problem. When someone is as disconnected from reality as to think that security means preventing teams of ninjas from physically breaking in, something tells me that they probably didn't have thought much about actual security. And will think even less about it in the future.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Mind, or "Church of the Poisoned, Mined"
Re-done by Boy George...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
...is even more difficult to get out!
Have gnu, will travel.
BC's old datacenter was in the A HREF="http://www.bc.edu/offices/its/projects/move2006/photographs/oneill/" O'Neil Library." My favorite pic is the fourth one. I hope that Cisco 6500 isn't routed by the Linksys job sitting on top of it!
Crap. Yea yea, I know I should use the preview... Thanks mom. Can you fix that for me mod?
I guess it's not so much strange as silly, but lots of companies seem to want their datacentres in the most expensive real estate the company occupies - apparently so that the C-class employees can watch the flashing lights. I've never been able to understand why, if you can get good connectivity, etc, etc, you would not put your datacentre into low-cost real estate and save a little cash.
...of a company which built a datacenter in the late nineties into an old swiss army bunker in the swiss alps. they even made a promotional video with the traditional heidi topic.
:)
:)
you can have a look at it here. internet-hype at it's finest...
the company (mount10) does not exist anymore but the datacenter still does and is beeing actively used by Swiss Fort Knox...
U.S. geography isn't always that cooperative - most of the missile bunkers were out in not-even-flyover parts of the country like North Dakota and eastern Montana, where there was almost no telecom infrastructure nearby and it was tens of milliseconds away from SF, NYC, or even Chicago.
And Canada has their own problems - even though most of the people live within 50 miles of the US border, the Canadian government has been doing things like offering tax incentives to put call centers in remote areas to deal with unemployment - former fishing ports in Prince Edward Island, etc. - where there's not enough local telecom infrastructure to get high bandwidth connections or diverse routes. Too bad, since they've got a pool of educated people who speak good English and something that passes for French and could use the jobs.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I have done quite a bit of research on using them. I had the idea to use it for hot sites, data storage and other DR related. One of the main problems is environmental. Old Titan II silos are FULL of asbestos and other carcinogens (PCB's). There is a very large cost to cleanup, drain, and refurbish the infrastructure. Much more than the purchase price. I found one in eastern Washington near major fiber optic lines, power and transportation that was ideal (with LOTS of work and $$$). If I had a 10-20+ million for purchase / startup (environmental impact studies, engineering studies, etc.) and good investors I might have had a go at it.
How about the data haven in Cryptonomicon.
Cavern Technologies in Lenexa Kansas (Kansas City Metro) is another one. 125ft underground, one level, several MILLION sq ft. Even their GenSets are underground!
And they sell real rooms at cage prices too. Pretty impressive stuff.
http://www.caverntechnologies.com/
"I am not an anonymous coward... I'm more of a courage challenged incogneto kinda guy"
AT&T Long Lines built a whole lot of these in the 1960's, they are anywhere from 5000 to 100,000 square feet, many of them are buried underground to survive a nuclear strike and they have on-site generators, diesel tanks, water tanks and other infrastructure that was intended to make them self-sufficent in case of all out nuclear war.
These would be great for a data center since they used to serve the old coaxial trunks and microwave links and new fiber lines are built along the same paths as the old system. Also some of them have microwave towers that could be useful as well (I think there was a Slashdot article on these a few years back...)
wouldn't it be safer to have the 3 step process BEFORE the heavy door? I mean whats the point of the door if just anyone can walk through it to get to the security checkpoint.
Who needs an expensive complex when my mom's basement works good enough? And if there's ever a problem, I can just swivel my chair around to fix it!
You are now manually breathing.
A glass NOC makes you feel like you have extra eyes to protect against somebody being where they shouldn't, but slides are cool stuff manard.
Here is a list of other stuff a _real_ datacenter should have:
Back in my day when we chiseled our bits into stone and sent them by mule train from village to village...
The InfoBunker, the Iowa site mentioned in TFA, is one of a number of cold war missile and/or communications facilities being used as data centers. The PJM Interconnection, which runs the East Coast power grid, is setting up a data center in a Pennsylvania site once used for White House-to-Kremlin communications during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Bunker in the UK is in a former Ministry of Defense command-and-control center. Ask.com is building a major data center in the Titan building in Moses Lake, Washington, a former missile control facility.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. --Denis Diderot
For the trifling sum of 1.5 million dollars you too can be lairing it up in style...
:-p
"The Missile Base consists of 57 acres of real estate. The center secured portion of the property is protected by the original barbed-wire-topped chainlink fence. There is a paved road leading into the property with dual entry gates.
Above ground is the original 40 X 100 shop building, two concrete targeting structures, two manufactured homes, two 8 X 8 X 40 storage containers, and the silo tops of the three missile silos, two antenna silos, one entry portal and a few other misc structures.
Below ground is a huge complex consisting of 16 buildings and thousands of feet of connecting tunnels. The major underground structures are:
Three - 160' Tall Missile Silos
Three - 4 story Equipment Terminal Buildings
Three - Fuel Terminal Buildings
Two - 6 story Antenna Silos
One Air Intake/Filtration Building
One 100' diameter Control Dome Building
One 125' diameter Power Dome Building
One - 6 story Entry Portal Building
and a few other misc buildings and areas."
- http://www.themissilebase.com/
http://cgi.ebay.com/Titan-Missile-Base-Central-Washington_W0QQcmdZViewItemQQcategoryZ1607QQihZ009QQitemZ190132455924QQrdZ1
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/10/10
If only I had the money and the crazy and the US citizenship necessary
Can't we all just get along
Security lesson #1. Can you spot the security problem in this high-security datacenter? Sure, it's got a vault door and armed ninjas. But you didn't count on the night janitor sneaking in a wireless router and plugging it into the network.
The media reported on a case in Norway where former UK SAS special forces soldiers was hired by a Norwegian company. It is claimed that the special forces unit got into the office building of a company they tried to buy. The goal was to eavesdrop on activity related to the potential takeover.
It is also reported that Russian company that also tried to buy the same company was using former KGB agents and organized crime groups to get the same kind information.
"The police report even claimed that Odin officials found evidence of the alleged bugging, which police also suggested was carried out with the help of personnel from the British special services SAS."
http://www.aftenposten.no/english/business/article1974585.ece
Sounds relatively close to the ninjas. How to protect your infrastructure from special forces soldiers and government intelligence agents?
So? If I'd want to get in, I'd use the air duct. We all know this is how you get physical access to these sort of facilities. Baaa!
.
And username Administrator password p455w0rd will most likely get you in without a hitch.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
"If you want an even more hardened environment for your data, you might look at the aptly named InfoBunker in Boone, Iowa, about an hour outside Des Moines. [...] The 65,000-square-foot, five-story site is dug deep into the ground. No one gets in without passing though the 4.5-ton steel door and then a three-step process. A scanner uses radio frequency to read the would-be entrant's skin as a biometric identifier. He then needs to use a keycard and enter a code on the keypad. This three-tier security is standard for high-level military installations..."
Ah, yes. The place to be after the zombies have taken over the world.
I will build mine on the bottom of the sea, a data center where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, and the great will be unconstrained by the small!
Sounds like a denominator is missing. Likely candidates are:
Reporters puzzle me. I realize they're not EE's, but don't they have some tenuous linkage to reality? Does 225 watts for an entire data center sound right to a reporter?
And watts of power are my favorite watts. As opposed to watts of mass, newsprint, or innumeracy.
There are problems with playing "military installation" when you're not a government. What do you do when someone shows up at your front door with apparent legal authority to enter? Could be an OSHA inspector, an FBI agent with a national security letter, someone from your insurance company, etc. They will not go through your "three step process". Failure to admit them could have consequences ranging from adminstrative through civil to criminal.
In reality, you let them in, no matter how many tons your front door weighs.
Also, physical barriers only buy time for an armed reaction force to respond. An ordinary metal fire door with an alarm and an armed security guard able to respond in two minutes is a considerable deterrent. But if you're out in the boondocks and have no armed security on site, any amount of metal isn't much deterrent. There are plenty of rednecks with the skills and equipment access to tear your fancy door right off the structure.
And lastly, if you rent racks to lots of customers, the value of access control at the front door approaches zero. Anyone who wants to get past your 4.5-ton steel door just rents a rack. So the important access control has to be on a more granular level.
In Frankfurt am Main, Germany, there is a datacenter in the old bunker at the airport. With all the security and technical infrastructure available at an airport, and the prime connection to every other airport of the world this just makes sense. ;)
This isn't phpBB. Nobody apart from /. staff can go back and edit someone else's post, and that's only happened once or twice due to legal reasons.
Yeah it might be cool to put a data center in an abandoned missile silo, salt mine, catacomb or crypt. But the practical site administrator should look for low real estate costs, reliable low-cost green electricity. Companies no longer have to put their IT centers where their employees are. If you put data centers in places such as Silicon Valley, Bangalore, Beijing where real estate and electricity demand are so high that you're paying 2-10x per square foot 2-10X per watt what you'd be paying elsewhere. If the datacenter is designed properly, it doesn't need a huge staff of on-site sysadmins and to be honest, if you can't find a good site sysadmin willing to work in Costa Rica, Tunisia, Norway or wherever electricity/real estate equation works out best, pay me enough and I'll be the site admin practically anywhere.
Let's put it like this: the very same institutions "where a disruption will affect global markets and everything that follows" have, about a dozen times in the last year alone, copied sensitive data on some sales-guy's laptop and it got lost. Some of the very same institutions had got pwned and had zombies. Some of the very same institutions have offshored that kind of data to places where it's entirely out of their control, just because it was a couple of dollars cheaper. (And I don't mean just to India, but also EU banks discovering that their whole customer data is in the hands of Swift... who'll pretty much give it to anyone who asks. So they can't fulfill their _legal_ privacy obligations in the EU, much less whatever extra they promised their customers.) Some of the same institutions allowed personal laptops on the intranet without any extra checks. Some of the same institutions will cheerfully tell any data over the phone if you just claim to be someone else. At least one such institution was probed by leaving 20 virused USB sticks in front of the front door, once a day, and 17 of those got actually used. At least one got pwned by "janitors" connecting keylogger gizmos between each keyboard and the computer. Some of the very same institutions forgot to disable employees' logins after firing them... or had one login for the whole department on everything except the personal workstation, so there's no easy way to invalidate it for only one employee. Etc.
Do you honestly see no disconnect there?
Because from where I stand, it looks like building an anti-asteroid defense system on my roof, but leaving the front door open. Not just unlocked, but wide open. It's ensuring against a SF threat, but being blissfully oblivious to the real every day threat.
You want decent physical security? A normal building and a couple of guards can offer you just that. You don't need to be dug in 50 ft below the ground. Put it on the last floor, so it doesn't get flooded, too.
Even if they sent some ninjas/007/mission-impossible/whatever types to physically steal your data, noone's going to blow up your freakin' wall to get in. So whether it's 50 ft of mountain or 1 ft of concrete, it's irrelevant. Unless those computers are (A) not connected to anything outside the bunker, and (B) not serviced by any humans, there are _far_ easier ways to get to that data.
_That_ is why I'll call it ego masturbation. I'm not against sane physical security, but, please. When something is this disproportionately blown out of any proportion or usefulness, I have this gut feeling that there wasn't much (real) analysis done when choosing it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Thanks for the correction, I'll try to remember it. Still, what with not being a native English speaker nor in an English speaking country, if that's the worst blunder I've made... I'll take it as a compliment :P
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You forgot about outsourcing with insufficient control on the handling of data. You may work at a bank, for an example (but it could be medical data for a hospital or insurance company) but the person on minimum wage cleaning data who works for another company doesn't give a fig for the data.
...would be a bitch down there I think
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
Makes me worry about balrogs. Khazad-dûm had that problem you know and dwarves are known for their data centers.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
Interesting. Sounds competently done. Other folks try for the same outcome and can fall short.
I've had occasional reasons to visit some of our "secret" government offices, usually multi-agency installations sort-of gathered under a DHS umbrella. The last one I went to had no sign outside, no sign on the door, no number on the door. How did I know I was standing at the right door? In this non-descript office building in a ho-hum industrial park, there were 50 cars parked outside with US government plates. Inside the building the only unmarked door had more sensors, locks, keypads and other high-tech doodads than I could comprehend. They might as well have put up a neon sign with a big arrow pointing at the door and saying "This way to the secret lair!!!"
Then the clerk (yes, the *clerk*) who let me in turned out to be a guy I had known from years back. I hadn't recognized his name when we spoke on the phone because he'd been issued an official alias, complete with duplicate ID. (Take it from me, if you want good fake ID, get Uncle Sam to make it for you. Nobody does it better.) He realized who I was and looked kinda sheepish when I called him by his real name.
For the entire time I worked there that day, the Special Agents in the place looked at me kinda funny. They just didn't seem to understand why I seemed so amused by everything around me.
The stangest datacenter I've been to is in "De Waag". It was build in 1488 and was originally part of the city walls of Amsterdam.
It only has five racks if I recall correctly, but it's very cool to see modern technology in such a medieval setting.
More info and pictures here.
When APC sold them the power, we were contracted to go in there and install a lot of the infrastructure. One of my co-workers actually did a lot of the work. It's a pretty cool place, according to him, and apparently the guy got it dirt-cheap compared to having to actually build the physical infrastructure himself. One of the NOC's we work at in St. Louis cost something like $80m, and this was a small fraction of that, with definite advantages over a traditional above ground data center.
It's an impressive place. And while having EMP shielding might be a bit stupid (do you need your servers up *AFTER* everyone is dealing with a nuke strike, truly?) having things like seismic shocks, already laid multiple fiber paths directly connected to major providers, redundant path power and water, that sort of thing if pretty damn hard to get when you build it yourself. This guy waltzed in with all that ready to go.
Bill
There are a lot of great places to put datacenters, not just for novelty reasons but because of the natural advantages of the site. Where I live there are lots of old brick mill buildings that would be easy to cool, and could be powered at least partially by water power. The problem is that they're all many miles from any kind of existing backbone link.
So - is it Westgate mall in Ottawa? There's some software company on the top floor, in the old movie theatre - I think there's an escalator...
this is a whole new approach to datamining... maybe a misunderstanding between the CFO and the CEO? CFO: "Sir, we need to perform datamining to retrieve more information about the interests and needs of our customers..." CEO: "Ah, you always one step behind me... I already bought the mine, now we are moving the datacenter over there..." CFO: "That's not precisely what it means..." CEO: "Zip it!, Less excuses and more productivity! c'mon move your ass"
Yeah, the NSA used to do that as well. They have their own exit off of the Baltimore-Washington parkway. It used to be unmarked and heavily-fortified.
Gee whiz, wonder what that is there.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I for one am glad they are sending cold air to the backs of the racks. It doesn't matter quite so much in this case as there is so much crap in the plenum that the air flow is already killed before it has a chance to get to the out vents. Oh ya, one more gripe... people will bring trash, dust, liquid, and a potential of pressing shiny buttons and pulling on cords.
This is more train-wreck than datacenter.
The way I heard it, the "something's up because of all the pizza deliveries" story had something to do with activity at the White House during Watergate. I looked it up at Snopes and couldn't find anything.
Anybody out there know the source of this story?
I was in Italy this summer and when I was in Portofino, they were getting ready to film a movie at Castello Brown. As I was touring the castle, I came across a little greenhouse outside and couldn't help but notice that they (the movie people, apparently) had set up a small data center inside it.
I dunno, seems like an awfully strange place to be setting up a data center.
Despite what EULAs say, most software is sold, not licensed.
When looking for strange places to build your data center there are things to consider first.
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
Sorry guys, it's been done before. Didn't anyone here go to RPI?