During the previous .com craze (2000-ish), I was at a Mercedes data center around Munich that was build in a former WWII bunker. The allies, when they captured it, decided against blowing it up because (according to our guide at the time), blowing it up would take so much explosives that it would leave a several-kilometer large crater and destroy all glass windows for 10's of kilometers around. They had some pictures of how (during the conversion to data center) they used wire saws ten of meters long to saw through the 5 meters of concrete thick walls. Pretty impressive.
That said, it seemed like the thick walls were more of a sales gimmick than actually being useful. Whether a wall is 10 or 5000 cm of concrete, no burglar will get through; and when there really is a nuclear war going on, the safety of the servers of the majority of companies in there wouldn't matter a bit.
We've got loads of German bunkers here in Jersey and I often think of what else they could be used for. Our neighbour has converted one to a totally soundproof media room, for example. The larger ones are of historic value and are being restored, but there are some good reasons to use the medium-sized ones for server rooms.
The temperature is naturally very cool inside, and they all have superb ventilation due to the air filters installed in case of chemical attack (Hitler was gassed in WW1 and so obsessed with gas locks & ventilation).
Physical security, that's obvious. Even those that were partially destroyed after the war were made safe by pouring more concrete to re-seal them.
A highly-interconnected island with Gigabit broadband and multiple links to the UK & France.
Hey, if anyone is interested in building 'Data Bunkers' this is a damn good place to start. The local government is pretty business friendly, too.
Fort Knox is a huge place though. I was thinking along the lines of a guy going on a shooting spree or something. The Fort Knox child massacre, that kind of thing. Very very unlikely I guess. Or someone starts up a Fort Knox site on Tor, and in the end lots of people get scammed.
It just seems incongruous to me to have a bunker in the Swiss Alps, more or less the pinnacle of safety, and then call it after something on the other side of the world.
So, if I may ask, for the small time host, where and with whom do people consider things to be... "reasonably" secure?
I'm less concerned about catastrophic physical destruction than I am about e.g. the Swiss equivalent of a national security letter / remit /warrant / whatever. Physical security is nice with respect to securing the physical hardware from unwanted access.
I used to manage a site that did nothing nefarious, but that did accumulate some rather personal discussions.
As I've considered whether to do so again, I've wondered where the hey I would / should host it, these days.
We always policed fairly strongly, including to e.g. removing copy/pastes of full news articles. The place was never about "law breaking". But I don't want to facilitate Agency X, BigCo Y, or SocialScum Z in their efforts to flesh out personal profiles from the server end, nor to throttle "reasonable" conversation.
I suppose the answer is "nowhere", these days. But maybe there is still a relatively "next best thing".
Looks like a really nice place for a bank vault, yes. But does physical security matter that much for the IT sector? If so, these ridiculous security measures are worth nothing if not accompanied by very, very heavy digital security solutions.
P.S. Why didn't they start a bank in there? Is banking too mainstream already?
Does physical security of bank vaults still matter that much nowadays? Most of your money is stored in bits and that applies to the super-wealthy at least as much as for the mere mortals. It's certainly still important, but the "we'll steal tons of gold and valuable papers" is probably getting old.
There is quite a few "datacenters" in bunkers in the Swiss alps and I guess in other places. Physical security does matter in many cases such as when a bank is storing tapes in a secure location without them being connected.
Often the servers are only storing a small amount of the information that is stored in the whole installation.
The client I work for has his servers in this thing, and I'll probably get to visit it soon. I'd rather they had a whisky bar and a place to smoke cigars installed somewhere in there.
One of my professors told us that UBS mirrors its whole data center to another one located in a mountain. Does anybody know if it's this particular thing? Or are there more than one of this?
That said, it seemed like the thick walls were more of a sales gimmick than actually being useful. Whether a wall is 10 or 5000 cm of concrete, no burglar will get through; and when there really is a nuclear war going on, the safety of the servers of the majority of companies in there wouldn't matter a bit.