Building a data center in a nuclear fallout shelter

I work in telecom and this is fun to look at, but I bet I could take their facility off the net with 4 guys and two rented backhoes.

Awesome physical security is cool for customer tours (SwitchNAP Las Vegas, anyone?) but the real measure of redundancy is to what extreme you have 1+1 or N+1 everything for your support gear (cooling, generators, UPS, giant -48VDC battery plant, rectifiers, etc), and the layer 1 diversity of your fiber routes in and out of the facilities. And the diversity of the upstream carriers from your east/west/north/south fiber routes, the topology of how your dark fiber link out of the facility reaches the nearest major IX points.

Diversity of power feeds: Do they have redundant parallel A and B side high voltage electrical feeds coming from the local grid utility, fed from two separate geographically distinct substations? Really important datacenters in the US and Canada do.

On a facility side, something like this which is arched vaults underground will be a cooling system nightmare, driving up costs considerably vs. an aboveground structure where you can easily locate heat exhangers/cooling towers and free air cooling systems on concrete pads next to a box shaped building. There's ways to achieve up to 10kW/cabinet cooling density in that old buried bunker but it will be a lot costlier to do than in, for example, a retrofitted warehouse-like structure that was formerly a newspaper printing plant.

An ISP in Sweden has something similar https://twistedsifter.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/bahnhof-da...

This is something of a nitpick, but they really ought to refer to it as a nuclear bunker, not a fallout shelter. A fallout shelter is just something that can shield people from fallout radiation. You need thickish walls but nothing too special. Some places in the US you can still see the "fallout shelter" sign on schools and such. However, it doesn't offer much protection from a nuclear blast. The intent is that the survivors of a near miss would stay in fallout shelters for a few days after the explosion to wait out the worst of the radiation.

It sounds like this thing is a purpose-built bunker built to withstand a nuclear explosion, so much more robust than the title would imply, at least to me.

I think OWSAP needs to update its DDoS vectors to include "HN front page listing".

> the racks we use for C14 ... weigh more than one ton on less than one square foot

> Each C14 rack weights more than one ton on less than one square meter.

I think the 1st of these was "translated" from metric; the latter sounds much more reasonable.

The location on Google Maps is https://goo.gl/maps/1YNoyQPAKmy

Roughly 58 Boulevards des Maréchaux, 75015 Paris, France

google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YJOLQe...

Ok, everybody knows that the IT department should be located at the basement, but they went a bit too far. :p

The SABRE reservation system is located in Tulsa in a nuclear-hardened bunker (on a former AF base). The joke is in the event of a nuclear war you could still get a airline reservation.

Site appears to be struggling to serve images at 13:16 UTC

It's down or super slow :(

The title of the post is not really clear.. Maybe it should state that they are building a datacenter in a Nuclear Fallout Shelter in the middle of Paris?