Bangladesh Considers Building World's 5th-largest Data Center In Earthquake Zone

An anonymous reader writes with news about a government plan to build a Tier IV data center in an earthquake prone district of Bangladesh. The Bangladesh Ministry of Information is considering the establishment of a Tier 4 data centre in Kaliakair, in the Gazipur region, an ambitious build which would constitute the fifth largest data centre in the world, if completed. And if it survives – the site planned for the project is prone to earthquakes. Earthquake activity in the environs is discouraging, with one nearby earthquake seven months ago in Ranir Bazar (3.8), and no less than ten within the same tectonic zone over the last three years, the largest of which measured 4.5 on the Richter scale.

Comments

And the probability of serious quakes is?

[Z00L00K]

And what is the probability of serious earthquakes in the area?

In Bangladesh I would be more worried about flooding and power reliability.

as opposed to SanFran and LA?

[nadaou]

Good thing there are no tech companies along the San Andreas!

And before anyone goes on to say that M3s and M4s are an order of magnitude or two smaller than a M5, the energy is more like 32 times more intense for each magnitude level, it's not log10.

Re:as opposed to SanFran and LA?

[Sique]

A 4.5 is similar in intensity to an heavy truck driving along your home.

Come on - a 4.5 is nothing

[Harlequin80]

The tabloid journalism is strong in this one. A 4.5 magnitude quake is utterly insignificant when it comes to structural design. If this project is as large as promised it will be designed by serious engineers to withstand significant quakes and not even notice something in the 4s.

From wikipedia

4.0–4.9 Light IV to VI
Noticeable shaking of indoor objects and rattling noises. Felt by most people in the affected area. Slightly felt outside. Generally causes none to minimal damage. Moderate to significant damage very unlikely. Some objects may fall off shelves or be knocked over.

Frequency of occurrance - 10,000 to 15,000 per year

Re:Come on - a 4.5 is nothing

[EvanED]

Let's do some back-of-the-envelope calculations. Based on http://earthquaketrack.com/bd-... (linked from TFA), I count five quakes in the last 3 years that are moderately close. (I'm counting the red, blue, and pink markers to the left, and orange and brown a little to the east; the latter are a bit questionable.) All of them are in the 4s in magnitude.

As a rough estimation (admittedly one that will probably diverge exponentially in any error), if you increase the magnitude 1 level, you decrease the frequency by a factor of ten. So five 4s in 3 years means you'd expect one in the 5s every 6 years or so, and in the 6s every 60.

Now, a moderate 6 quake is at the point where you have to explicitly build to resist earthquakes. So from this (very, on a number of axes) rough guess, it seems like they definitely need to consider the possibility... but it's also not something that is likely to present a huge challenge or anything.

Re:Come on - a 4.5 is nothing

[ShanghaiBill]

A 4.5 magnitude quake is utterly insignificant when it comes to structural design.

Indeed. I live in the SF Bay Area. A 4.5 is enough to wake you up if you are a light sleeper, but will not cause damage to anything.

Re:Come on - a 4.5 is nothing

[rtb61]

It's a 'major' data centre, I would be worried about getting data in and getting data out. It really makes no sense to build one huge data centre and have it reliant on localised, power, staff, weather, tectonic stability and all those communications cables coming in and going out. Having to shift huge amounts of data very long distances. As the amount of data rises, so the idea of building data centres to service each and every capital city around the world makes a whole lot more sense. This enables full mirroring of international data services, distributed back up of any data centre across other data centres and full content distribution services and even the contracted provision of game servers. Building many distributed data centres enables you to do many more things and of course localise those data centres in terms of government regulations and avoid a range of judicially or law enforcement inspired issues. How small a population should be served with a data centre, that really depends on how much you get into those other data handling services, like mirroring, game serving and content distribution, localising that traffic saves a huge amount of money and, local sales staff always benefits sales and allows you to tweak services for that locale.

No worries

[cstec]

I was totally good with storing private customer data in Bangladesh before.

They must really like segfaults

[kruach aum]

Thanks folks, I'll be here all week.

"Simple" solution

[Dutchmaan]

Create an artificial lake and build the structure floating on it. Use the water for cooling and for shock protection from earthquakes.

Re:Factual inaccuracie

[Harlequin80]

You seem to have forgotten that all risks have a probability factor as well. That quake was huge, and very rare. Yeah they happen, but what is the life expectancy of the facility? 50 years? There will be a probability associated with earthquake risk during that period, does the risk out weigh the other benefits? Whether that probability is accurate is an entirely different question but it still exists.

Otherwise every seismic sensitive structure would be built in the centre of Australia.