Re: Backbone Infrastructure and Secrecy

[Eric Kuhnke <eric () fnordsystems com>]

I stand corrected, last I saw any information on the bunker was well over a year ago.  

My opinion is that business continuity/disaster recovery customers can save money by using two separate commercial 
grade facilities in widely spaced cities (for example, London UK and Frankfurt DE), rather than going for a "all the 
eggs in one basket" approach.  Whereas major commercial exchange points will have a large selection of carriers, 
government and military bunkers are usually far from any major city centre.

Attack-trained guard dogs?  Two ton doors?  It's all very impressive when showing off to potential clients (or in 
novels such as Cryptonomicon), but also very useless in the real world.  :-)

At 12:31 PM 7/10/2003 +0100, you wrote:
> I'm not subscribed to the list, so I'm not sure if this will make it.
> But, anyway: it has come to my attention that Eric Kuhnke
> <eric () fnordsystems com> made the following post to the nanog list:
>
> > I recall reading, last year, about a "Cyber Bunker" outside London UK
> > which is being offered as colo to major banks.  The banks were raving
> > praise about it.  This facility is an ex-RAF centralized radar
> > control site, buried dozens of feet underground w/ thick concrete and
> > designed to withstand nuclear weapon overpressure.  Blast doors, EMF
> > shielding, dual-redundant air filtered generators, the works.
> >
> > The people who bought it and turned it into a colo neglected to
> > mention one thing:  It's in the middle of a farm field with a single
> > homed fiber route to Telehouse Docklands.
> >
> > Anyone have a backhoe?  *snip*
> >
> > DIVERSE ROUTES, people!
>
> Being the owners of what we believe to be the only ex-RAF centralized
> radar control site that offers colo in the UK
> (http://www.thebunker.net/), we're a little puzzled.
>
> Our bunker _does_ have diverse fibre which we believe is also armoured
> to a higher standard than usual[1], and certainly buried deeper (since
> it enters the frame room a _long_ way underground). We also have
> multiple providers routed across the diverse fibre, not all terminating
> in Telehouse. In short, about as far as you can get from a "a single
> homed fiber route to Telehouse Docklands".
>
> If indeed you are talking about our bunker, we'd be very interested to
> know where your information comes from, so we can correct it. If you
> aren't, we'd love to hear which bunker you are talking about.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Ben (Technical Director, ALD)
>
> [1] Funnily enough, the military weren't exactly forthcoming about
> details like this.
>
> -- 
> http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html       http://www.thebunker.net/
>
> "There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
> doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff