Comment by palmotea
4 days ago
> If these data centres are rebuilt, you'd maybe expect them to be rebuilt in new locations behind existing _permanent_ (and seemingly quite expensive) air/missile defence batteries in Bahrain
I've seen data centers that were built to withstand an aircraft impact (they were located on a major airport flight path). I wonder if they'd rebuild these to that standard or something even stronger, given these attacks. It probably wouldn't help much against ballistic missiles, but it might make it more resilient against drone attacks.
Here's a Google Maps link to BAH53 (Manama), it doesn't look like the hardened data centers I seen (e.g. sloped walls like a bunker): https://maps.app.goo.gl/6DjhQs753p6EHQUu6
Can you give an example? I find this hard to believe. Why not pick a location not within a "major airport flight path"? It seems much cheaper.
London has lots of datacentres in Slough (near Heathrow) and Docklands (London City Airport, but also many LHR planes transit over).
AWS/Azure/GCP/etc Colo in Equinix/Telehouse datacentres there, and those Docklands locations in particular were picked based on location to LINX (major London peering/interchange), and LINX was put in Docklands out of desire for relatively proximity to telcos, and London’s banking/finance industry.
Were those obviously hardened to withstand the impact of an jet aeroplane? I doubt it.
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At least one colo facility I’ve been was an ex-defense facility. And it had reasons to be where it was, and to be hardened.
> It probably wouldn't help much against ballistic missiles, but it might make it more resilient against drone attacks.
I think the two kinds of attacks are so different that they require different defenses.
Drones need not fly in straight lines. Data centers need ventilation, providing a path for drones. Putting grids in a ventilation shaft will stop the first drone, but a coordinated attack will use one drone to blow up defenses and a second/third/etc one to reach the target
And presumably eventually those exhaust ports would be obfuscated, necessitating the stealing of plans to identify such vulnerabilities.
Heat is relatively hard to hide. The best solution likely spreads it out over a large area, creating a building with myriads of tiny holes.
It is probably far cheaper to simply have global redundancy for the data and compute than to put the datacenter in a bunker.
Tell everyone that you have global redundancy and they won't even bother to damage it because it won't help their cause.
Not all businesses want to pay the premium for that level of redundancy. Businesses with lower margins want resilient service at a lower price point. With AI and contributed shift to cloud, the demand for lowering TCO for a greater share of the larger pie becomes greater.
If they don't want to spend the $ for redundancy, they definitely don't want to spend the $$$ for a war-proof datacenter.