The Emergency Internet Bunkers

Barence writes "Should the Doomsday Clock ever strike midnight, we may well discover, finally, whether or not the internet really could survive a nuclear conflict. If it could, then a handful of datacenters dotted around the world would likely be all that remains of the multi-billion-dollar hosting industry. These secretive, high-security sites, tunneled out of mountains or housed behind the blast-proof doors of one-time NATO bunkers, are home to the planet's most secure hosting providers. This article profiles the emergency internet bunkers."

Comments

Re:Would it matter?

[mikael_j]

You're assuming no one will be left alive and have a will to rebuild.

It is very likely that even a large-scale nuclear war will leave hundreds of millions alive which would imply there might still be enough remnants of various organizations left to pick up the pieces. In fact, if your company, non-profit organization or random government agency came out of a nuclear war slightly less destroyed than the competition, wouldn't you want to be able to hit the ground running? Fetch your important data, get your organization up and running like before? Or would you just throw your hands in the air and decide to whither away and die a slow agonizing death from starvation because obviously nuclear war means even the survivors are 100% sure the be screwed?

I'd rather try surviving, seems I'm not the only one.

(Not to mention that a lot of these datacenters are also very useful for more limited disaster scenarios).

Doomsday can't match the hype

[khallow]

I see a lot of nonsensical doomsday posts out there. Even if we have the full blown thing with everyone cutting loose with all the nukes they have and a couple of bad years due to fallout and nuclear winter, there's still be a lot of survivors, including the very countries that were involved in the nuclear war. It makes sense to talk about data surviving such things, because humanity and some sort of society would survive.

Second, one doesn't need to have a full blown nuclear war in order for this data to be valuable. Maybe a widespread computer worm wipes out a lot of companys' data and backups. Maybe someone EMPed North America. There are a number of scenarios far short of the end of humanity where most electronics could end up being useless or destroyed.

When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth

[Dynamoo]

When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth.