Rostelecom Calls for 'Doomsday' Data Centers to Counter Drone Attacks and Infrastructure Risks
Rostelecom has called on Russian businesses to establish geographically dispersed backup data centers, referred to as ЦОДы судного дня or 'doomsday data centers,' to maintain operations after primary sites are lost.
At the RBC Tech forum, deputy chairman of the board Valery Ermakov stated that earlier infrastructure strategies focused on concentrating key services in a few locations for cost efficiency. This model has become vulnerable following drone strikes on data centers, forcing companies to incorporate previously unimaginable scenarios into recovery planning.
Ermakov proposed a micro-cellular architecture that distributes services across numerous sites, separates them geographically, and reserves spare capacity. The core question, he noted, has shifted from economic savings to determining what remains operational if a single facility goes offline.
Connecting these distributed sites requires robust high-speed backbone links. Ermakov highlighted that Russian trunk networks are already overloaded and that a significant portion of fiber optic cables was laid 20-30 years ago, raising the risk of capacity shortages.
Rostelecom presented its TEA NEXT line, stretching from Kaliningrad to Mongolia, as one source of additional transmission resources to mitigate potential deficits.
The urgency stems from recent attacks that halted operations at three Yandex data centers located in Sasovo, Kaluga, and Vladimir. The outages affected both company services and customers of Yandex Cloud, prompting Yandex to arrange accelerated data and service transfers to partner cloud providers.
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