Open Sauce Software
Tasty titbits from people using Linux and other open source software in business.
Monday 22 December 2008, 3:20 PM
Festive nuclear bunker news...
What's so Christmassy about a nuclear bunker? Ask the Richter Scales, or BastionHost of Canada...
It could be I'm developing the bunker mentality, but nuclear bunkers are everywhere. Even a capella heretics the Richter Scales say "From now on we'll have to live in bunkers..." in their Christmas song.
Meanwhile Canadian hosting company BastionHost has bought a bunker in Nova Scotia, to turn into a data centre. Apart from the security of the site - which was one of seven emergency government headquarters Canada built in the Cold War - there are other factors making it ideal for datacentre use:
1. A low ping to key locations. Nova Scotia may seem remote, but it's on a great circle route between London and New York, so in theory the time to get traffic between the two is as low as it can get, "We are in the middle here, with round-trip ping times of just 54 milliseconds to London and 11 milliseconds to New York City - even less to Boston," the company's CEO told InformationWeek.
2. There's redundant back-up power, which BastionHost is going to upgrade. Canada's regular power supply is better than that of the US, too, says Self: "We see Atlantic Canada as a giant UPS between North America and Europe. Our grid was completely unaffected by the blackout of '03 in the Northeast, and we do not experience rolling brownouts or power shortages."
3. Canada's privacy laws are better than those in the US, he says, particularly since the US Patriot act: "In the US, authorities can get a special subpoena and go into an office and seize what they want. In Canada, we have stringent privacy laws, both at the federal and provincial level, and we can offer our clients the right to due process."
So far the bunker still has its 1950s fittings, including blast doors, air filtration, nuclear warnings and control panels. Self doesn't seem to have answered the question of whether he'll keep the retro-Strangelove look, or update to Bond-baddie chick, like Swedish service provicer Bahnhof.
( Apologies for the technical hitch. The above should be a picture, courtesy of David TS Fraser, showing Anton Self in his bunker, waving his hand perhaps a little casually near a control panel that seems to be still powered up. )
The price for the Nova Scotia bunker was not revealed, but iwas reported have been valued at around $290,000 (Canadian dollars) despite an original cost of $2.7 million) to build the bunker.
Meanwhile, the former Symantec bunker, near Twyford, sold last week, for arond $240,000 after an auction failed to sell it, according to reports at the Southern Daily Echo and elsewhere.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=4zaNuqLyGpA
It could be I'm developing the bunker mentality, but nuclear bunkers are everywhere. Even a capella heretics the Richter Scales say "From now on we'll have to live in bunkers..." in their Christmas song.
Meanwhile Canadian hosting company BastionHost has bought a bunker in Nova Scotia, to turn into a data centre. Apart from the security of the site - which was one of seven emergency government headquarters Canada built in the Cold War - there are other factors making it ideal for datacentre use:
1. A low ping to key locations. Nova Scotia may seem remote, but it's on a great circle route between London and New York, so in theory the time to get traffic between the two is as low as it can get, "We are in the middle here, with round-trip ping times of just 54 milliseconds to London and 11 milliseconds to New York City - even less to Boston," the company's CEO told InformationWeek.
2. There's redundant back-up power, which BastionHost is going to upgrade. Canada's regular power supply is better than that of the US, too, says Self: "We see Atlantic Canada as a giant UPS between North America and Europe. Our grid was completely unaffected by the blackout of '03 in the Northeast, and we do not experience rolling brownouts or power shortages."
3. Canada's privacy laws are better than those in the US, he says, particularly since the US Patriot act: "In the US, authorities can get a special subpoena and go into an office and seize what they want. In Canada, we have stringent privacy laws, both at the federal and provincial level, and we can offer our clients the right to due process."
So far the bunker still has its 1950s fittings, including blast doors, air filtration, nuclear warnings and control panels. Self doesn't seem to have answered the question of whether he'll keep the retro-Strangelove look, or update to Bond-baddie chick, like Swedish service provicer Bahnhof.
( Apologies for the technical hitch. The above should be a picture, courtesy of David TS Fraser, showing Anton Self in his bunker, waving his hand perhaps a little casually near a control panel that seems to be still powered up. )
The price for the Nova Scotia bunker was not revealed, but iwas reported have been valued at around $290,000 (Canadian dollars) despite an original cost of $2.7 million) to build the bunker.
Meanwhile, the former Symantec bunker, near Twyford, sold last week, for arond $240,000 after an auction failed to sell it, according to reports at the Southern Daily Echo and elsewhere.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=4zaNuqLyGpA
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