General

With This Technology, Your Data Center Can Survive an EMP Event — continued

Solving the problem
Manto has patent-pending inventions that could form the basis of a startup. In addition, he hopes to build and company that would work with other entrepreneurs and inventors. It would become an EMP integrator, solving the problem for the mass market.

"Most solutions to the problem today are custom-built solutions," Manto says. "I am trying to come up with mass-produceable solutions, so that we can avoid the recurring engineering cost every time we try to solve the same problem."

Manto focuses on the metal. Different metals absorb different frequencies of the multiple pulses that comprise an EMP event. Manto wants to make the solution cheaper, and that means using less metal. He says that if you separate the metals electrically (presumably with wafers of a non-conducting material such as rubber), the effectiveness of each layer of metal increases compared to a device that allows the different metals to touch each other.

Once you have the metals that you need, you have to protect your electronics from electromagnetic pulses arriving by air and through the wires. Through the wires is relatively easy in that you need to install an EMP-rated surge protector. Even that isn't something you can usually buy off the shelf.

"The wires," Manto says, "the phone and electric power wires act as tremendous antennas saying ,'come zap me.' The result is like an electronic tsunami of up to 3 million volts, some experts say (even though parts of the grid, such as the transformers, break along the path of the tsunami)."

Protecting equipment from an EMP pulse through the air, however, is even tougher.

You need to regulate all of the air that enters your facility. Manto simplifies this in his patent by building a modular EMP-resistant data center inside a shipping container, and points out that Google and Microsoft are already using shipping containers for their data centers (see, for example, Microsoft Embraces Data Center Containers from the focused publication Data Center Knowledge).

Air is pumped in through wave guides, perhaps similar to metal straws, and the EMP is absorbed as it bounces off the walls of the wave guides.

In order to show off the technology, Manto says he has also built a protected trailer to military specifications (MIL-SPEC). "It is one of the first EMP-protected command centers, and can be used as a mobile data center or a mobile command center."

Without this protection, every piece of electronic equipment is an antenna absorbing the pulse. Manto says that the size of the equipment will affect the amount of energy absorbed, so a cell phone would absorb far less than the cell phone tower it's trying to connect to. A little laptop will absorb less energy than a 3 foot equipment rack.

"The larger you are, the harder you fall. Some communications systems may have to live without grid power for one month to one year or more."

A rating for EMP protection
Manto wants civilians to be able to easily understand whether or not they are protected, and is proposing an EMP protection rating similar to the Uptime Institute's rating for data centers (for more, see webopedia).

The rating system would be based on MIL-SPEC, which would be level 3 of the system. Level 4 would exceed MIL-SPEC, and levels 1 and 2 would be less.

E1 would be 20 db reduction, E2 would be 50 db, E3 is 80 to 100 db (differing for different frequencies of the pulse), and E4 would be higher, perhaps 110 or 120 or 130 db of reduction.

Equipment that absolutely has to survive the EMP would need to be protected at E3 or above, but Manto notes that you may not be able to protect everything or you may need to protect your assets gradually over time.

Should you choose to protect your network, Manto says, you'll need to set priorities. Having replacement equipment standing by helps. In addition, unplugging anything that's not in use may help that equipment survive an EMP event (in addition to saving power).

"If you have an emergency operations center," Manto says, "and the equipment is used once each month in a training exercise, turn it off and unplug it when it's not in use."

Nevertheless, you may well not be able to protect everything that you'd like to protect, so you'll need to set priorities, and start by protecting your most important components.

If you have the resources, you may want to think about going off the grid, and I don't mean propane.

Manto is working with a university campus to provide a site for a business continuity technology park.

"The idea is that you find a more remote location that is rural but is between two or three cities," he says.

The technology park has housing for employees and families and is has a hydrogen power generator whose waste product is water, not nitrous oxide.

All of this is not for everybody, but, Manto says, if you are in the data center business, and especially if you have customers in sectors such as banking or government, you need to protect mission critical components and EMP protection could give you an edge.

Charles Manto will be a featured speaker at the Fall ISPCON show in the sesson Building a Data Center.

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