General

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

Charles Manto says that some infrastructure would survive an electromagnetic pulse, but that it's up to us to determine how much survives.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [October 15, 2008]

It's a doomsday scenario that most of us prefer not to think about. Russia (or even a rogue element of an army or terrorist group) fires a nuclear weapon that detonates in midair over the heartland and the ensuing electromagnetic pulse spreads out across our infrastructure.

Everybody starves to death without power, refrigeration, and transportation. Or they die of thirst without water. Factories stop working and never start up.

Of course, notes entrepreneur and project manager Charles Manto, military planners have thought about this for decades and have ensured that the U.S. would be able to retaliate with its nuclear missiles if Russia struck first.

Who is Chuck Manto
Manto entered the tech industry the way that many people entered the ISP industry. "I came into this industry as a frustrated user," he says.

In 1979, he looked into building the office of the future, a system that would allow him to work from home and that could deliver the entire library of congress to a handheld device. The technology was not there, but his research resulted in the first patents listed under his name at the USPTO.

At the time, storage technology was not capable of doing what he wanted.

Manto says he then joined Gartner Group, where he evaluated business plans, which is a wonderful job.

He then went into the public sector, helping the state of Michigan build rural communications infrastructure and then working for defense companies.

In the mid-1990s, he joined Pincus Communications, a CLEC, as senior vice president for business development. He is still proud of the rollout the company achieved during a period of nine months: class 4 and class 5 switches in about 100 Bell Atlantic colocation facilities.

In summary, Manto has an eclectic background with both entrepreneurship and management in telecoms and government.

The mission
It is possible to harden infrastructure and protect that infrastructure from the pulse, but it's not easy. "The EMP gets you two ways," says Manto, "through the wires and through the air."

So you need to protect the wires that come into your facility, and you need to protect the air as well. To protect against the pulse that travels through the air, you need to run your air through a kind of metal straw. The pulse will be absorbed by the metal in the pipe.

Different metals, Manto says, absorb different frequencies.

The EMP threat
Manto forwarded to us some recommended reading to help prepare for the interview.

There is a Congressional Research Service report on EMP [.pdf]. It says that many nations are capable of delivering an EMP blast inside the United States, either through a missile or by using a suitcase bomb.

The three separate pulses that are part of an EMP are described in detail in the Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack [.pdf].

Finally, and most interesting, Manto points us to a report [.pdf] commissioned by Instant Access Networks, a company he founded, on the effects of an EMP blast. The report says that depending on the scenario, we could lose access to the electric grid for between 1 month and 33 months. Here is a chart from the report:

The blast will affect us differently depending on how it is delivered. The higher the altitude of the blast, the greater the radius of effect.

However, note that there is extremely widespread disagreement about how deadly an EMP event would be. Some say it would destroy all electronics, but recent government tests suggest damage might be minor. Manto is in the middle. He says that any prepared structure should survive.

He adds that terrorists are not the only threat. There is a real possibility that solar flares could cause a geomagnetic storm and result in major power outages. This happened in Quebec in March of 1989 (see Geomagnetic Storms Can Threaten Electric Power Grid).

"There could be once in 50 or 100 years solar storm. It's like the big earthquake in California: we know that it will happen but don't know when," Manto says.

He adds that the terrorist threat is real. "The cost to the economy is so huge. A 20 or 30 kiloton weapon smuggled out of Putin's Russia plus a scud missile would cost a few million dollars and could cause 1 to 10 trillion dollars in damage to our economy. We can take out the asymmetric terrorist threat and also protect ourselves from a solar storm."

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