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