Having just been burgled last week (my flat, not my data centre) and lost 3 laptops, including a precious macbook pro, to it, I can certainly relate to the feeling of insecurity.
After I was burgled I was reminded of a chinese proverb, that goes along the lines of: "A room full of jade and gold, nothing can guard it." The point of it is that if people know you have lots of precious stuff in your room, you won't be able to stop them from breaking in eventually.
In my case, my laptops were visible from the street while I worked (my home office faces the street), even though I normally close the curtains in the evening, and that was probably the determining factor in drawing the burglars in. They only needed to notice the laptops once and then keep hanging around until they saw an opportunity.
As far as data centres are concerned, qualified thieves will obviously know for a fact that there's good stuff to be had there. If you do have such expensive, custom equipment, perhaps the only thing you can do to protect yourself is to disguise it as something else. You can't disguise the whole data centre, but you can disguise racks.
One possible way to do this on a large scale would be to render the server cabinets opaque, so that there is no way to identify the high-price ones from the lower price ones. This would make it harder for the thieves to "do business", so to speak, so they may head elsewhere because it's just not convenient.
I'm not sure if it's intentional, but the data center we use in Sheffield looks like an absolute tip from the outside. Just looks like your average inner city, run down, squatter filled mess. Inside it's another story though, so I think you can disguise a data center!
After I was burgled I was reminded of a chinese proverb, that goes along the lines of: "A room full of jade and gold, nothing can guard it." The point of it is that if people know you have lots of precious stuff in your room, you won't be able to stop them from breaking in eventually.
In my case, my laptops were visible from the street while I worked (my home office faces the street), even though I normally close the curtains in the evening, and that was probably the determining factor in drawing the burglars in. They only needed to notice the laptops once and then keep hanging around until they saw an opportunity.
As far as data centres are concerned, qualified thieves will obviously know for a fact that there's good stuff to be had there. If you do have such expensive, custom equipment, perhaps the only thing you can do to protect yourself is to disguise it as something else. You can't disguise the whole data centre, but you can disguise racks.
One possible way to do this on a large scale would be to render the server cabinets opaque, so that there is no way to identify the high-price ones from the lower price ones. This would make it harder for the thieves to "do business", so to speak, so they may head elsewhere because it's just not convenient.