Recommendations for Hong Kong datacenter, and a sanity check for my geopolitical conclusions ?

Sat Jul 25 16:18:55 UTC 2009

On Jul 25, 2009, at 12:05 PM, Charles Wyble wrote:

>
>
>> Yes, thank you - that was the datacenter I had read about in my own  
>> research.  What did you think of the height of that building and  
>> its location on reclaimed sea land ?  It makes me nervous, but as I  
>> said in a different message in this thread, it looks like ALL of  
>> urban HK is reclaimed so ... who knows.
>
> Well where does the HK govt put there servers? If they outsource  
> them to a colo, then that might be an interesting place to start.  
> Sinking into the sea seems a remote possibility.

Hong Kong is considered to be in a low seismic risk area and is not  
near a plate boundary. I don't think that there has ever been a major  
Earthquake recorded there. Past performance of course is no guarantee  
of future results.

See, e.g.,

http://www.cedd.gov.hk/eng/publications/information_notes/doc/in_2007_05e.pdf

Regards
Marshall

> I don't know much about Hong Kong. I imagine others on the list  
> might be able to speak to that better.
>
>
>> I was saying that I did not want the servers _inside of_ China, for  
>> obvious reasons.  Although the actual geography of shenzhen makes  
>> it much more appealing, even though we want greater freedom RE:  
>> content/filtering/freedom of speech/etc. (if only for principles  
>> sake).
>
> Something something govt event, something something shutting down/ 
> throttling all connectivity to get there message out.
>
> The point is, that placing servers directly in China presents  
> significant operational issues, that a business can understand (hey  
> guess what we can't hit our VPN at random times completely outside  
> our control). It has nothing to do with free speech, and everything  
> to do with continuity of operations.
>
> China is.... difficult. I was tangentially related to a China  
> deployment project for a massive e-commerce company.  My manager was  
> discussing the project, and I told him I wanted nothing to do with it.
>
> Every time my team mate turned around there was another discussion  
> with legal going on. Not to mention EVERYTHING was 100% outsourced.
>
> It was pure unbridled hell for everyone involved with the project.
>
>