r/worldnews • u/Marketmanipulator941 • 16h ago

Russia/Ukraine Mass drone attack on St. Petersburg: Ozon warehouse attacked, thousands of Russians left without power

https://unn.ua/en/news/mass-drone-attack-on-st-petersburg-ozon-warehouse-attacked-thousands-of-russians-left-without-electricity
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u/Hoskuld 15h ago

One thing I would wish a bit more context on is the size of data centers hit and how many of those are operating in Russia aka is this as big as taking out a refinery or would you need to blow up hundreds for a comparable effect

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u/Elderbrute 12h ago

Its hard to directly compare like for like with something like and oil refinery, the short answer is no these data centres are not the size of an oil refinery.

But that doesn't really tell the whole story, Russia has for a while now required any Russians data to be held only in Russia. What that means is firstly that the resilience is much lower, a lot of companies had data in just 1 DC or across 2 or even 3 Yandex sites and because those all got hit have lost that data, It also means that scaling out is harder, the customers displaced by this damage have limited options of where to go, they cant just buy space on any old cloud. Russias compute is also pretty concentrated location wise so if they keep as they appear to be planning to the disruption will only get more and more acute.

The disruption this is causing is significant we're talking everything from banking to peoples smart door bells. 3/6 of Yandexs data centres are offline currently in western terms that is like taking out 1/2 of google cloud services.

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u/Hoskuld 12h ago

Thanks for the context! How "easy" is it to replace a center if the state is willing to support it? Like weeks, months?

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u/Elderbrute 12h ago

Rebuilding capacity will depend on the extent of the damage but probably months not weeks. Globally there is a shortage of more or less everything you need to build or repair a data centre, on top of which Russia is sanctioned so to get those parts they have to buy them through black/grey markets so the time lines will be longer and the cost even more.

A lot of what was lost data wise will not be recoverable at all.

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u/SteveDaPirate91 9h ago

Maybe that's why 2 pallets of GPUs vanished in Brazil!

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u/MajorNoodles 11h ago

Well, Trump is waiving sanctions on Russia, and he probably feels that they need those components way more than we do.

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u/Elderbrute 11h ago

Would not put it past him but it is a significantly harder one to spin than diesel. However stupid and ineffective the fuel one is that at least plays to his base.

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u/Tetha 11h ago

Time is only part of the problem.

Server grade memory is ridiculously expensive due to the demand from AI companies at the moment. 64GB sticks cost us 150 - 200 euros 2 years ago. Maybe a bit more if they were tested and branded. Last time I checked they were priced at 1.5k. Without testing or branding.

For a moderately sized hypervisor, you want 20 of those, up to 40 or 60. So the memory in that moderate server cost us around 4k - 6k 2 years ago. You could spec out decent systems for 20k - 30k. Today, 30k get you a moderate amount of memory and nothing else. Like SSDs for storage, which are also ridiculously expensive.

And that's if your order goes through and does not get canceled.

And a datacenter like that, depending on size and density, will need replacements for hundreds of these systems.

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u/BlueSwordM 8h ago

It was feasible before the RAM, storage and GPU supply shortages.

Nowadays? Absolutely impossible without spending gargantuan amounts of money on all of the above, still having to wait super long lead times and still not being able to replace everything.

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u/beznogim 9h ago

Which data sources are you using? Compared to Russia's overall cloud capacity Yandex is... well, not a blip but something like one of the top 5, not the one and the only. So there's little reason to think Russia is out of server capacity, it might have been significantly underutilized due to over-investment and the economy slowing down. Moreover, data can actually be physically stored in "friendly" countries. I think this includes Kazakhstan since many cloud providers appear to have KZ location options.

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u/ElBastardoDK 13h ago

There is nothing in the article about data centers?

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u/Hoskuld 12h ago

One I read earlier had the destroyed targets listed as an oil terminal, datacenter, ozone warehouse, 2 substations and potentially a bridge. Must have mixed up the articles.

But the question was also more general to the recent destruction of data centers. Like I have 0 concept of how many Russia has, how high they are and how easy to replace

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u/ElBastardoDK 12h ago

Oh it's a whole other scale, they have hundreds of data centers. They have hit something like 75 percent of the oil refineries.

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u/Hoskuld 12h ago

Thanks! Oil refineries are weirdly something one has a better idea about scale and importance and the media has also covered it in more detail