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Comment by PeterCorless | Hacker News Reader

American and European data center providers should start thinking about design for resiliency versus drone and missile strikes.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/techland/drone-and-data-ce...

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Outside say redundancy across sites (a thing many offer in one way or another) ... there's not much you can DO.

When I used to work with US bank and financial institutions we used to do "disaster recovery tests" and it effectively meant they shut off a whole site and ran on their backups to see what happened.

Offering redundancy across zones is one thing (and I'm pleased to offer it to my customers). Getting them to use it is quite another thing.

Even if it was "only" 2x or 3x the expense to have a completely multizone setup, the ongoing operational burden is too high to justify over the 2, 10, or 100 year timeframe when no outages happen which could have been avoided.

Companies dependent on a single Amazon zone just give up and wait during a zone outage, blame it on Amazon, then get back to making money the next day.

Well that's a long way of saying even in military offensive scenarios, Amazon is expected to have some zone up to use which is to say they're doing a decent job.

Contrast with no AZ now or in the next quarter. Then surely people would take precautions like switching to Google or equinix at a minimum.

>there's not much you can DO

AT&T used to put telecom switches in bunkers.

ATT was paid by the government to do that. I doubt the commercial market can support those costs.

Right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Offices for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_of_government

Preferably after they thought a little more about the more regular fire and/or water ingress hazards.

Now that you can stuff an entire room with only high-G-resistant solid state drives, there should be fewer excuses for losing machines before determining a fire suppression system to be either inoperable or insufficient (but never tested and measured under realistic conditions).

Not just data centers. Europe is close enough to need an all-encompassing national strategy against this.

Europe needs a "national" strategy? Do you mean regional or international strategy?

Supranational, at the EU level.

Yes, this makes sense! Got it.

During the early days of the Russian invasion in 2022, it was realized that almost all of Ukraine's redundant offsite backups were in various locations in Kyiv.

More sanctions, that will show ‘em!

Not reelecting Donald Trump to stop the aggressive destruction of global collaboration and peace would be a vastly cheaper strategy

I'm surprised domestic groups have not hit the US datacenters yet

deleted - misinterpreted parent comment

Um... is there another way to read this?

>I think most of the opposition really wants is stability and a return to normality. Blowing shit up is diametrically opposed to that goal.

So there isnt terrorism because most opposition dont want to blow up data centers? You are identifying opposition as potential domestic terrorists. As opposed to saying there just arent these type of domestic terrorists. Which have nothing to do with normal opposition.

And then you seem to imply there may be reason to resort to domestic terrorism?!

>Maybe only once most people realize that normality isn't coming back will that change.

Once again Elon Musk thinks ahead of the curve a bit. Sticking the DC is space is a pain in some ways but sklces a ton of sociopolitical problems.

An in turn it's exposed to solar flares, fast space junk, Russian and Chinese anti satellite weapons.

What happens when dozens of space centers leave space junk in orbit ?

Say goodbye to safe space launches...

Space launches have never been "safe". It's always a risky endeavor for a variety of reasons.

But concerns over space junk are vastly overblown. Orbit is a big place and satellites can maneuver to avoid the riskiest paths. And if data center satellites ever actually get launched (might never happen) then they'll be in low orbit where any junk will burn up within a few years.

I should have qualified my usage of the term safe. Space launches of course have risks, because space is hard. I was simply trying to highlight that more space junk whizzing by at very very fast speeds could cause major damage and NASA & ISS have always been worried about this.

That's one of the reasons that ecologist push-back against "technologists" who say "just build nuclear reactors everywhere"...

we want a safe a decentralized infrastructure

Except that nuclear reactors are very robustly built, unlike data centers. Nuclear stations are designed to withstand against the airplane dropping in.

Also, attack on a nuclear station is such a drastic and severe thing that it counts as the use of nuclear weapons. And if we are at that stage, it's a bit silly to worry about small things.

If we regard large nuclear power stations as emblematic of centralized power generation, rather than just the nuclear aspect of it, then another target is the step-up transformer and the rest of the connection to the transmission grid.

I don't think those are designed to withstand an aircraft dropping in, nor would their destruction count as the use of nuclear weapons.

I agree. The only real argument against large nuclear reactors is the negative security aspect. All other arguments are nonsense as far as I am concerned. Even this aspect can be reduced by using smaller reactors. The existence of a negative argument doesn't mean it should influence our decisions in the long run. In general, the argument is real but isn't significant enough to be taken seriously.

Lowest bid small reactors would be nothing like the more or less properly built old ones.

Maybe the rules have changed in the US, but as of early 2023 SMRs were subject to the same "Aircraft Rule" regarding their containment structures as any other commercial reactor.

It won't defend against Putin sending 50 drones against it. And yes, it is useful to worry about nuclear proliferation, and absolutely not "silly"

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