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Nuclear Bunker Houses World's Toughest Server Farm
Lanxon writes "Deep inside the Swiss Alps, a former nuclear bunker is now the ultimate hiding place for the world's most sensitive secrets — the Swiss Fort Knox. In a lengthy feature, Wired gains access to the server farm designed to survive a full-scale military attack. From the article: 'As we punch our codes at the checkpoint, the yellow door opens into what looks like a city of server towers, their green LEDs flickering as a technician in a white jumpsuit runs diagnostic checks. [Later], we are in a dimly lit tunnel next to what looks like a metal oven door carved into the side of the rock. "These are expansion rooms in case you have an atomic explosion outside," Christoph Oschwald, a retired Swiss paratrooper turned contractor, says. The thinking behind the rooms, he explains, is that if there were a nuclear explosion, the rush of high-pressure air would fill them through vents in the opposite side. Then, the vents would snap shut, trapping the air before it had a chance of damaging the fortress. "There is a lot of protection you can't see," he says. We stroll past an intricate network of insulated pipelines that carry water up from the underground glacial lake to the cooling system.'"
So is this where they store the schematics for their Swiss Army Knives?
Might survive a nuclear attack, but not some script kiddie and an admin that likes pictures of Pam Anderson.
Another one of these? Sounds like everybody keeps their servers in an unused bunker these days.
I guess with all this safety and protection some guy named Homer from Springfield need not apply?
Is the infrastructure getting data to/from these servers going to withstand a nuclear blast? Do the servers run Linux?? Does anyone know if their "Apocalypse Level" technical support package is for the hosting customer only or will they extend it to site subscribers as well???
(*SNIP!*)
Underground glacial lake for cooling?
I thought it was the CO2 that was melting the glaciers in Europe, not farmville.
So how many megawatts of heat are they pumping into the glacier they rely on for cooling and are they prepared for the ensuing flood?
This is deja vu all over again. First off, if it's not a chain of similar setups you have a single site problem - BLAM goes your redundancy. Secondly, define "nuclear attack". If that means "survive the EMP from a nuclear blast" there would be some value in it, but that's going to be a tad hard to prove without seriously upsetting neighboring Gstaad with radiation :-).
However, most importantly, this stopped being news several years ago - if this is a new setup it's just yet-another-one, if it's not it's not news either. Some of these setups are quite cute, but the idea isn't exactly novel.
Ah, got it. The hint is in the article: "Rauber and his team, a public-relations representative" - who paid who for what here?
Yawn.
Insert
Or someone forgetting to pay the electricity bill. :)
It's nice to know that my servers will still be running after a nuclear holocaust.
I thought this was an odd statement in the article, "The point is, data is more valuable than money -- because money is replaceable, data is not."
Is Herr Oschwald familiar with backups?
World's toughest server farm that you know about.
It's not nearly as secure now that we all know that it exists and where it is...
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Sure it can survive a nuclear assault... but can it survive a lawsuit?
will it survive a backhoe cutting the data lines?
MR burns will just cut back on that part
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
It's the persistence of the data that matters far more than the immediate accessibility of it.
Cable can eventually be relaid, even after a nuclear explosion. Drives can be removed from the servers, as well. The data, however, could likely not be replaced as easily, if ever at all.
You're probably thinking that these are front-end web servers serving up shitty web sites like Facebook or twitter, since that's all you're familiar with. Yeah, hipsters need to get their data fix, but those aren't the kind of servers you'd host in this fashion. These would likely be high-end data servers storing sensitive and extremely valuable information, not just a 140-character summary of your breakfast, the fact that your profile lists your sexual preference as "Men", or some shitty pics you took with your cellphone at the bar last weekend.
Proper availability is generally achieved through redundancy, not silly stunts like this.
If things get so bad that Switzerland is getting nuked, then my data will be one of the least of my worries.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
So let me get this straight...
They hide secrets here.
It's a server farm in a nuclear bunker.
With data retention and servers?
Is it by chance called Crystal Peak?
Ah no matter Skynet isn't controlled by a central location anyway...
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
impressive
I guess the "full scale military attack" doesn't include a couple privates beating the shit out of some nerds until they get the access code?
THL phish sticks
The article states "Wired has been instructed not to disclose its exact whereabouts." However it also gives a fair amount of info about it's location. I'm not familiar with the Swiss Alps, but there's probably at least a couple of people on the Internet who are.
What we know is:
It's in or near the "tiny village of Saanen, in the canton of Bern."
You have to "pass a Tissot boutique abutting a tractor dealership before the road dives into dense forest and follows a stream."
It "appears to be nothing more than a timber operation, with lorries moving wooden payloads around a gravelly clearing."
Is there enough there to find this place?
(Elmer Fudd voice)
Be vwerrry vwerry quiet. I'ma huntin' fibah!
(/Elmer Fudd voice)
It is a feature to keep data more secure!
Tomorrow is another day...
1. Buy Old Abandoned Nuclear Silo
2. Put Server Farm in Nuclear Silo
3. Wait for Free Promotion of Services to Appear on Slashdot, Because They Run a Batcave Article Like This Every Few Months!
4. Profit!!!
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
All I see in this article is a fancy piece of advertising for a company who runs a data center located in a bunker and runs their whole marketing on the "military toughness" fad. Also apparently they only offer storage so forget about having seedboxes and what have you, hosted there... Nothing to see here, move along...
Who would nuke Switzerland?
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
This sounds like a brilliant way to ensure that the servers and their caretakers outlive the general population of Switzerland. Let them breed for a few hundred thousand years after the nuclear holocaust and I suspect the place will be just right for a visit by The Doctor.
With all the money spent on this, you'd think they'd be able to hire a decent English translator. I'm assuming this is their website.
or it didn't happen
That article about all of this awesome tech in a sweet facility...and the only picture they can muster up is a generic panorama of some foothills? I want to see caves full of servers! I want to see giant ice sheets being melted for the purpose of cpu cooling!
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Safekeeping data and safekeeping material goods ARE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT THINGS.
A physical object must be kept in a secure vault with physical access protection, because there is only one of it. Information can be kept orders of magnitude more safely simply by storing redundant copies of it. Even if you are after keeping the information secret rather than protecting its integrity, encryption is more effective than steel doors.
Or maybe you're after ensuring that the computers remain connected to the internet? But if the location is subject to a fraction of the force a bunker is needed to protect against, any cable connections to the outside are likely to be destroyed.
Saanen has a population (as of 31 December 2009) of 7,053.
Saanen is a very small town. I looked at it on the satellite maps. It only has one stream, which runs strait through the town.
How about someone else find the tractor dealership? I tried Google maps, but couldn't find it.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Maybe the secret documents on how to stitch photos of a swiss valley together are stored there too. http://cdni.wired.co.uk/674x281/s_v/Terabytes.jpg
But can it survive an X5, or higher, solar storm? All the wires that must run to the surface would be definite weakness.
Checking the article... it was built in the 1960s. So its survival was based on 1960s bombs, which were dropped from bombers or arrived on mid-range missiles. Both platforms were, of course, less accurate than one would like, a few years behind whatever new thing was currently being tested, and subject to weight limitations. Plus the *exact* bunker location was secret (preferably its very existence was secret), as even then it was hard to design something for a direct hit.
In other words, it could probably be taken out by conventional bombs today. (This is no slight against the Swiss; pretty much every bunker from back then is susceptible to modern tech. And the few tougher ones are not immune to the ICBMs of the 1980s paired with the targeting systems of the 1990s. Why do you think the US had a full nuclear command post airborne at all times, even back then, when it had NORAD built inside a mountain? Because they weren't actually sure that bunker could take an arbitrary number of direct hits).
That said: it's still very cool, and no one is going to be firing any nukes at Switzerland anyway. The worst they need to survive is an earthquake or a terrorist truck full of explosives, and the bunker ought to be able to handle either just fine. (IMO, the only non-government places that currently need to consider being nuked are in India and Pakistan (vs each other) and Japan (from North Korea), and even those are kind of a long shot).
Charles Forbin beat them to the punch decades ago.
I worked in a similar setup outside Toronto in the 1990s. It was a nuke bunker built for NorTel, which supposedly was designed and built in the 1960s to withstand a direct hydrogen bomb hit on Toronto. It housed NorTel and Bell Canada switching equipment and servers, but also rented out cabinets to anyone paying for a contract. Nevermind the ease with which I could have left a big box of explosives wired up to a detonator triggered over its Internet connection. But even though I had to pass through a half dozen checkpoints between the surface entrance and the datacenter underground, my pager used to go off quite reliably when people paged me. Regular radio waves penetrated this "nuke proof" bunker. I expect an actual nuke would have fried everything inside it, regardless of how much the Canadian government paid some contractor to protect it.
But NorTel and our other government clients believed it was nuke proof. Even though their pagers went off inside it, too. I have no faith that this Swiss bunker is any different. After all, if a nuke did hit it, who was going to sue the builders for failing to honor the contract?
--
make install -not war
How much for colo? I could so use a safe space for my porn collection!
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
On Google Earth, Saanen isn't just a town, it's also the name for for a municipality. I guess that would be the Hamlet, right?
On the very south of that region there are some mountains. There seems to be two tree lined glacial rivers that branch southward from the village of Gstaad. Following either of those small rivers gets you to what looks like a glacial lake.
We know it's under mountains and has a glacial lake for cooling water. Saanen the city proper doesn't sit upon those, it's most visible aerial feature is an airstrip. Following the two branches I mentioned before, the one by Gsteig seems to be closer to the more heavily forested area. So I'd look around there. Unfortunately the Google Earth resolution isn't exactly hi-res enough in that area to look for much in the way of mountain entrances or vents. Not to mention the entrance could be under what looks like a normal house. The areas also have a couple of bus-stops, so I doubt you'll see something like a parking lot that could also be a give-away.
Good luck and good hunting!
Well sir, as the others said, this place is a data store, its not for live front-end servers, in fact TFA even states that they receive a lot of data via hand delivery (bonded courier, etc).
So in summary, no, no one cares about the access to the servers, they only care that they are still there and the data is retrievable somehow.
I will go further to point out that their most secure areas are just safes that not even the staff of the place are allowed to enter, only the "owner" of the particular safe, and are as such not digitally accessible at all.
...
It's been said before but I'll say it again :)
Redundancy and distribution are the only viable solutions for long-term persistence of information.
Bunkers are bunk. Major problem that we all know where this one is now.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
TFA doesn't seem to have a link: Swiss Fort Knox
Don't get the wrong idea - it's as much a marketing gag as anything. During and after WWII, the Swiss determined that their best defense was to be able to retreat to - and then attack from - the mountains. In the last couple of decades, the Swiss military has been reducing the number of bunkers that it uses. This company picked up an army-surplus bunker and decided to market it as the safest place to store your data.
So, sure, the bunker was originally designed to survive a nuclear strike. Which means that it certainly ought to survive any sort of lesser event, like floods and earthquakes. And physical security is, of course, easy. The single-site problem, and script kiddies - these are not really huge concerns: big businesses tend to use this place as their extra, just-in-case offsite backup. Of course, if you really want to pay them money to run your normal web-site there, I expect you can...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Wired writers seem to have a bit of a penchant for embellishment. They could probably do an article on me sitting here picking my nose and composing this message on Slashdot, and there would be so much fluff that it would really seem like an extraordinary thing.
BUT... What the hell did they do with the big juicy nuggets of geeky goodness? So they have a little datacenter in a bank vault under a mountain in a nuclear bunker in a country that will never get nuked. They also apparently have a customer that does off-site tape/disk rotation, like you'd find in just about any datacenter, enterprise, or really any other place that has disks/tape.
AND..... HELLO.. PICTURES?! He says that the guy told him to take all the pictures he wants, but the best he can muster is some generic photo of a little village in the Alps?!
And then, if the article weren't lacking enough, half of it is him going off on a tangent about some (relatively) lame collection of documents describing file formats so that the good professor will still be able to access his porn stash in the year 2050.
You get an F+, sir!
My company has its website hosted from a nuclear bunker. Very secure, reliable, etc etc. Actually getting the guys there to DO anything for us, (like upgrade MySQL), is an exercise in frustration, to the point that it is a real limitation on our ability to develop our product.
So, when looking for hosting or backup, don't allow 'OMG Mega Nuke-proof Security' to distract you from also evaluating all the other relevant criteria (such as responsiveness and know-how).
... that when the world is nuked, the survivors can retrieve a copy of Phil Collins' and Tina Turner's CDs.
Would it survive a Wordpress installation?
I think I found it, and am tempted to brag. But no good would come of it, and only harm.
So you'll just have to suffer.
(Oschwald, you owe me. One paratrooper to another. Next time I'm in Switzerland, a bier, hear?)
What do you get when you mix an A-Bomb and a glacier? Bazillions of gallons of boiling water rushing down to your underground complex.located in the glaciers watershed.
especially ignorant and hypocritical considering the same argument made as a single (*SNIP*) statement made after mine was moderated as insightful.
slashdot = stagnated
so in summary, yes yes, you and the others are all ignorant hypocritical morons.
slashdot = stagnated
the truth = troll
Correlation is not causation, dipshit.
Michael Kristopeit === troll. Whether or not you are occasionally right has nothing to do with it.
the point isn't that i was right... or that something that happens ON EVERY SINGLE OCCASION still happens "occasionally"... the point is that verified truth is dismissed by those empowered by the infrastructure maintaining this internet web site chat message board.
you're an ignorant hypocrite.
slashdot = stagnated
Congrats on reading the bolded test at the top of the page :)
Now, if you read further down:
As for your tone, I take my meds every day that stop me from being a perpetually angry arsehole (crohns), why haven't you taken some?
...
slashdot = stagnated.
you're assumption pertaining to my mood is very telling.
you're an idiot.
the point is that verified truth is dismissed by those empowered by the infrastructure maintaining this internet web site chat message board.
No. It has nothing to do with the truth. You're just a troll. You get moderated as such. Troll harder.
Sometimes you're right. Other times you're wrong. The common denominator isn't truth. The common denominator is you. You're always a troll.
What, no references to gnomes?