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Nuclear fallout shelter becomes cloud storage bunker

Cold war relic beneath Paris now houses cold storage at €0.002/GB/Month

French hosting company Online.net has revealed its new data centre resides in a former nuclear fallout shelter.

The company explains that its new bit barn was once a “passive defence shelter” named Abri Lefebvre built in 1937 atop a disused quarry out in the fifteenth Arrondisement. In 1946 authorities decided Paris needed to harden up to cope with nuclear weapons.

As Online.net's post explains, the bunker fell into dis-use for years and the French government eventually sold the buildings above in 2012. Online.net thought there was potential for a data centre so snapped up some of the land.

The post we've linked to above outlines the considerable effort required to turn the bunker into a bit barn: suffice to say there's been digging, remediation of many sorts, waterproofing a-plenty, figuring out what to do with a well that wasn't on the maps, adventures with pre-stressed concrete and lots of graffiti removal.

The result is a facility 25 meters below street level into which Online.net plans to install “more than one hundred racks” of cold storage. The company says each rack weighs a tonne and occupies less than one square meter, El Reg feels safe guessing this is hard disk storage although the two-hour recovery time could hint at other media.

Customers can arrange for archives of up to 40TB and all data will be “encrypted, replicated and distributed between 10 and up to 44 independent drives.” Online.net says “Our storage algorithm allows us to regenerate any corrupted or lost data.”

The company thinks it's got Google, Amazon and Backblaze beat on price, as it starts at €0.002/GB/Month plus the usual charges for handling data. Details here for those of you running price comparison spreadsheets. For the rest of us, just the prospect of being able to say our data lives in a nuke-proof bunker may be incentive enough to give this service a whirl. ®

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