As above, so below: El Reg haunts Scaleway's data centre catacombs 26 metres under Paris Parisian cloud and web-hosting outfit Scaleway invited The Register to poke around an underground data centre last week as part of the company's inaugural ScaleDay shindig. "We've built it in an old fall out shelter, 26 metres beneath Paris," they said. "Want to come and look?" How could we resist? With city space ever …
Which should be all European banks and administrations by default, with many large European companies coming in a close second. Nobody should make it easy for the NSA to get their grubby mitts on our data.
So their business should be thriving.
Not sure I'd trust an old bunker to stay particularly dry particularly in certain circumstances. Even the nice expensive ones often struggle to keep the water out in places much drier than Paris.
Some of the old London sites had some serious design flaws and ran a severe risk of backfilling if there was any sort of widespread sustained power outage. And not with water.
"Not sure I'd trust an old bunker to stay particularly dry particularly in certain circumstances."
Exactly my thoughts. And even less a bunker located underneath La Seine !
For sure, they're probably renting at a couple of bucks per months, since who would get there ? But come on, it's a freaking DC and the worst enemy of a DC has always been water !
The kit is quite heavy. Come the zombie apocalypse, it will be easy for marauding gangs of feral survivors/evil mutants to locate and beseige those shelterig therein due to the large pile of rack equipment to be found near otherwise innocuous "electricity substation" or "Metro station fire escape" doors.
"What if you design your software to account for this data center going down?"
Everyone I've seen do that without regular (once per month minimum) testing is finding themselves, a couple of years after last testing to fail massively because both DCs were necessary to good service.
Aircon failed?
No problem https://blog.scaleway.com/content/images/2016/08/velos.jpg! On yer bike!
Formidable mes amis!
I tried to run my business on their platform for about six months and it was a disaster. Terrible reliability issues, a surprisingly poor feature set, and support that knew how to say “sorry for the inconvenience” but couldn’t actually fix anything. I eventually moved when I got VAT registered, and they said they could not change their billing system to accommodate that - I would have to clone the servers into a new account, transfer the data and start again.
I was really hoping to be able to use a European company, but the options all seem poor. I’m now using AWS with servers in Ireland. The main disadvantage of AWS is their bandwidth costs, but you can largely mitigate that using Lightsail. If you fancied Scaleway for their ARM servers, now AWS has that too (but not Lightsail sadly).
I would only recommend Scaleway if you are trying to build a fault-tolerant system (i.e. live database replication, failover etc.) and want to be able to test it. With its regular crashes, I had plenty of opportunities for debugging recovery scripts, notifications, etc. On AWS I have never experienced a real failure, and simulated failures are not quite as good a test.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
