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.'"

Seems excessive

[Skewray (896393)]

Why would I want to physically access my botnet?

hmmm

[User 956 (568564)]

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.

Step right this way sir

[Sentri (910293)]

For the trifling sum of 1.5 million dollars you too can be lairing it up in style...

"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/ [themissilebase.com]

http://cgi.ebay.com/Titan-Missile-Base-Central-Washington_W0QQcmdZViewItemQQcategoryZ1607QQihZ009QQitemZ190132455924QQrdZ1 [ebay.com]

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/10/10 [penny-arcade.com]

If only I had the money and the crazy and the US citizenship necessary :-p

Re:

[RMH101 (636144)]

In the UK there's an outfit called http://www.thebunker.net/ [thebunker.net] - they've bought two old MOD command-and-control nuclear bunkers and fitted them out as datacenters and archives.

3m thick walls, TEMPEST shielding, fences, dogs, even frickin' EMP protection...

I always wonder.

[ender81b (520454)]

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.

that's a futuristic plan.

[User 956 (568564)]

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.

Old bunkers often have good Cooling and Power

[billstewart (78916)]

A friend of mine bought an old missile bunker in the UK to use as a data center back during the late-90s boom. It had redundant power-grid connections, lots of cooling, and raised floors, so it cost a lot less to condition the space for data-center use than if he'd started with a basic warehouse shell like many of his competitors, and it was close enough to London for latency not to be a problem but far enough that the real-estate costs were cheaper.

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.

I'll give you a futuristic plan...

[wlad (1171323)]

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!

Re:

[Cheesey (70139)]

But will it be secure against our evil RIAA overlords? I hear their army of sharks is even more dangerous than their army of lawyers, thanks to the recent addition of fricking laser beams.

"Ah, Mr Wlad. I offer you a simple choice. Either die in my shark tank, or pay me... one trillion dollars per MP3 on your hard drive. Muhahahahaha..." Etc., etc.

Re:I always wonder.

[Fulcrum of Evil (560260)]

In fact, forget the datacenter!

If I were a CIO...

[Mahjub Sa'aden (1100387)]

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.

Re:If I were a CIO...

[rcw-work (30090)]

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.

2400-2700ms minimum latency? Check!

Re:If I were a CIO...

[Mahjub Sa'aden (1100387)]

2400-2700ms minimum latency? Check!

Don't go confusing them with technical details!

Re:

[Mahjub Sa'aden (1100387)]

If there were, say, an array of data transfer points, combined with an elaborate system of mirrors and caches, it might actually work!

And I clearly need to take a walk to clear my head.

Re:If I were a CIO...

[trolltalk.com (1108067)]

So stick it in the Canadian north.

1. cooling - just open a window
2. power - lots of dammable rivers
3. safe - nobody around for miles

Re:If I were a CIO...

[BorgCopyeditor (590345)]

Canada's rivers may have blisteringly cold water, and currents fast and merciless enough to sweep dozens of children to their deaths each year, but that's no reason to call them damnable.

Hey nay sayers

[geekoid (135745)]

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!

Re:If I were a CIO...

[ATMD (986401)]

That's no moon...

It's the solar system's biggest porn collection.

Re:I always wonder.

[lelitsch (31136)]

Make that 3rd floor with backup power. Flooding [theregister.co.uk] can be a real bitch in a data center.

Re:

[ResidntGeek (772730)]

I mean, honestly, is it just me or are all these "exotic" data centers just a way to boost your CIOs ego at gatherings?

You say that like it's a bad thing. Really, is making the CIO feel cool all that much worse than whatever the datacenter is doing anyway? It's probably calculating stock prices, keeping track of financial information, caching web pages, or whatever. It's all just the mental masturbation of modern society anyway. Might as well feel cool doing it, then some concrete good will come of it.

It is a bad thing

[Moraelin (679338)]

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.

Let's put it like this

[Moraelin (679338)]

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, b

Re:

[Stripe7 (571267)]

Data centers can be in strange locations, before the advent of data centers companies just put their computers anywhere. Two strange locations I know, a closet in the womens bathroom at a company and a closet in the another companies machine shop. One had access issues, the other had massive metal dust issues. One large company for some strange reason put all their printers in their computer room, talk about paper dust issues. One other one I remember was under the companies staircase.

Re:I always wonder.

[Blakey Rat (99501)]

Hey baby...

I got a 65,000-square-foot, five-story data center with a 4.5-ton steel door... IN MY PANTS!

Basically, yes

[Moraelin (679338)]

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

Re:Basically, yes

[Patrik_AKA_RedX (624423)]

I haven't even heard of a recent data loss or theft that involved a team of ninjas breaking in and stealing hard drives.

Ofcourse you haven't heard of it. They're ninjas. They sneak in, replace your HD by a death one and leave without you knowing it. How else would you explain HD crashes? So next time you hear the sound of a death harddrive, you'll know there is a ninja nearby...

Hmmmmm

[oborseth (636455)]

"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.

Re:Hmmmmm

[Joebert (946227)]

I've heard the saying Big girls need lovin too, but damn.

Re:

[s.bots (1099921)]

The three step process:

1. Sex
2. ??????
3. Pregnant!

Must...contain...the EVIL

[insanemime (985459)]

Where else are they going to contain the evil emanating from the server hosting goatse?

Patented by Google

[KillerCow (213458)]

From TFA:

[caption] DeBeers' data center, in the Arctic Circle, in two retrofitted shipping containers.

So, they are paying Google royalties [slashdot.org] for the technology which Google invented, right?

..in Strange Places

[thatshortkid (808634)]

What, like the back of a Volkswagen?

Re:

[corsec67 (627446)]

No, that is an uncomfortable place

So

[Colin Smith (2679)]

You bribe the people who work in the place.
 

Best one I've seen

[Render_Man (181666)]

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.

oblig

[Biff Stu (654099)]

Where-is-my-underwater-data-center?

I would tell you, but then I would have to kill you.

If you negotiate the minefield in the drive

[thewils (463314)]

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!!!

A Note On The Three Check Security Approach

[smackenzie (912024)]

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.

Re:

[weeboo0104 (644849)]

1) What is your name?
      "Cowboy Neil"
2) What is your quest?
      "To fix the bricked file server"
3) What is the Emacs key binding for going to the previous line and decreasing the indent?
      "What? I don't know tha.. AARRRRGGGHHHHH!"

Sealand...

[Tmack (593755)]

Is a datacenter/colocation, and its own nation, and an off-shore WW2 fort. It did burn last year, but is still around [sealandgov.org], and has been looking for investors...

tm

one isn't enough

[wkk2 (808881)]

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.

Are they allowed to sacrifice in the chapel?

[Colin Smith (2679)]

You know. The ritual sacrifice of chickens & goats required to keep the Windows servers operating normally.

 

Re:

[Tmack (593755)]

You know. The ritual sacrifice of chickens & goats required to keep the Windows servers operating normally.

Probably have to, to keep all the daemons happy....

tm

missile silos

[NoBozo99 (836289)]

I wonder why someone hasn't thought of using a abandon missile silo as a data center.

Bunkers in military comm sites

[miller60 (554835)]

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 [datacenterknowledge.com] once used for White House-to-Kremlin communications during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Bunker [thebunker.net] 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, Wash

Above the ceiling

[maggard (5579)]

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.

Why the door?

[The -e**(i*pi) (1150927)]

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.

All this physical security

[Allnighterking (74212)]

And username Administrator password p455w0rd will most likely get you in without a hitch.

"225 watts of power"

[crucini (98210)]

To make the best use of the power available, ADC is building what Cohen calls state-of-the-art HVAC systems that can cool in excess of 225 watts of power.

Sounds like a denominator is missing. Likely candidates are:

• Square foot and
• Rack unit.

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.

Re:But no data security?

[The-Ixian (168184)]

floppy disk huh? I am going to go out on a limb and say that your favorite band is The Spin Doctors.