r/UkrainianConflict • u/JaB675 • 1d ago
Russia's Yandex will need six months to replace equipment damaged by drones
https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/10/12/8057595/156
u/Aware-Palpitation536 1d ago
Everything in a data center is 2x more expensive than it was so it will cost much more than the original equipment
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u/ChainedBack 23h ago
Nah it will be more. Aren't they sanctioned with those American Nvidia cards? They will have to pay black market prices. China is already squeezing them dry with razor thin natural gas prices. You can bet they will charge some very nice fees for that.
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u/Alaric_-_ 20h ago
Also the price will be high because China needs and wants those same equipment for themselves.. It's question to them "how much do we want cash to get for something we really need?"
It's easy to suck russia dry for fiber optic cables and crap army equipment when they have excess of it BUT when it's something that nobody in the world has enough of, russia is going to have pay top dollar for it. Dollar, euro, pounds, etc... I doubt China will accept rubbles or yuan for that, they want hard currency. Oil and gas they can get from anywhere but getting to dictate terms when the customer has no choice? It's gonna cost, a lot and it's not gonna be something they can get easily. And it sinks russia deeper into the Chinese pocket the less Kremlin has.
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u/INITMalcanis 8h ago
If I have to pay £600+ for DDR5, the Russians better be paying more than that!
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u/Think_Positively 17h ago
China will probably sell Russia the compute for less than it would cost to rebuild the centers. Russia would then have the added bonus in knowing their BS farms are safe because no one is launching drones at China.
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u/YoshiSan90 15h ago
China and Russia are allies of convenience. They’ve been enemies for a lot longer than allies, and China wants the Russian far east back. Russia would not want to give them that much control considering they are likely to be at war sooner or later.
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u/ILikeCutePuppies 1d ago
Depends on how old the equipment is but probably more expensive than 2024.
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u/poukai 1d ago
Not just the equipment cost, but the data itself. Like do they have distributed backups? Is this going to result in a Flamingo sized hole* in Russian public and corporate records.
There is no way for us to know this, but the Ukrainians could have just taken out the Russian moblisation records.
A bit like Operation Carthage during WWII.
*) I don't know if Ukraine used Flamingos during the attack on the Yandex data centers, but it sounded good...
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u/Emergency_Club_2164 19h ago
Most likely they don’t have distributed backups and storage.
For SORM they have a datacenter in Moscow handling 99% of the load.
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u/sexinsuburbia 14h ago
There’s definitely distributed backups and secondary and tertiary government data centers running SORM.
Even if 99% of the load is being handled through a centralized data center in Moscow, this would be deemed a critical system for national security.
Also, high likelihood this is stored in a bunker.
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u/Emergency_Club_2164 12h ago
You would be surprised how SORM is built up. Most of it is running in one datacenter. It has a star topology. Where all nodes send all their collected data at 00:01 to the central hub for processing and to be indexed for searches.
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u/sexinsuburbia 11h ago
I'm not sure how correct this is. SORM has two components: operator equipment and remote control points (RCPs). Operator equipment is what's installed at telecoms, whatever source data centers are out there - equipment used to monitor traffic, execute queries and send back data to FSB remote control points (RCP).
Remote control points are hosted at FSB regional hubs - it's more of an access protocol. And those hubs have their own data centers and infrastructure standalone from "Moscow".
Moscow might have a centralized data center that stores queried results, 3-6 months of queries and reports, perhaps. Maybe this is where you're getting "99%" from. And again, I'm sure there's plenty of resiliency architected into that design. You can't just blow up a "data center" and it all goes away. That shit is getting backed up multiple times to other locations and nodes.
This is IT 101. How to back up data and restore.
SORM at the RCP level is more like writing an SQL query. Target data really isn't stored on the system. It's reports and extracts generated on an ad hoc basis, locally downloaded.
Everything about SORM indicates it is incredibly resilient and was largely built out by Nokia. They'd never design a system so fragile a rogue spy could sneak there way into a server rack, toss a grenade in there and disable state surveillance.
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u/Emergency_Club_2164 11h ago
I have no idea what your source is. But you are pretty on point. Data is stored at regional levels, edge devices. But the majority of data stored is in one location. All data is sent to one location at midnight for processing.
And all of the smart search capability is stored in one location. It is fragile. Very fragile.
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u/sexinsuburbia 10h ago
Sure, there'd be a single prod server supporting the network, providing enhanced functionality to the nodes. Potentially storing authentication protocols, network mapping, administrative tools, etc. Something that you'd expect to find at the application and db layers.
But it doesn't necessarily mean data is stored only in one rack. There's likely fallback IPs for prod support servers stored at completely different locations they can fail over to. There would be air-gapped backups on tape they could pull out and rebuild the system from.
That's not hard to do. Export to tape once a month, move to a secure location with backups from the last 10-years stored on a rack in a small room. Cheap, easy. It's been done forever. Still one of the best ways to maintain backups.
Nightly processing happens at one location, but then can be propagated out to support environments quickly.
There's also going to be numerous non-prod testing environments with are mirrors of production, getting refreshed on a schedule.
All of this is standard IT processes.
Source: worked in IT for 20+ years deploying, managing, and maintaining enterprise applications for Fortune 100 companies, across highly regulated environments in finance and healthcare.
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u/Emergency_Club_2164 7h ago
It is not one rack. There are no backups. There is just racks upon racks crammed with mostly spinning disks procured by the most corrupt for top dollar/rubble. Mostly running Oracle DB’s.
You have no idea….
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u/EqualOrLesserValue 9h ago
Folks would also be surprised how bad Russian institutions are at contingency planning.
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u/Emergency_Club_2164 7h ago
Yeah they would be surprised.
I would be surprised to the first contingency plan from them.
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u/Belltower_2 13h ago
The single most devastating attack the Luftwaffe carried out in The Blitz was a lucky hit on Mincing Lane, where all the records for tea importers were stored. The tea itself was fine, but the records of where it was, types and quantities, and who owned it all went up in smoke, making distribution nearly impossible.
To solve this problem, Britain bought the ENTIRE tea crop of 1943 (except the plantations held by their Japanese enemies, obviously), just to prove they could. And to put pressure on Ireland, which was resolutely neutral in WWII but dependent on Britain for tea shipments.
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u/INITMalcanis 8h ago
Huh, that's fascinating. Right inna tea, eh? No wonder they unleashed Air Marshall Harris.
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u/sexinsuburbia 20h ago
There should be backups, in all seriousness stored offsite. As well as redundancy across other data centers.
Disaster recovery plans are standard for any decent size tech company, even Russian. It would be next level incompetence, especially with Ukraine drones swirling around.
Disaster recovery is standard because any number of natural disasters could happen. Especially with sensitive data. Some company policies literally require backups to be stored at minimum hundreds of miles away.
This is pretty accurate in the US. I’m sure Russia has some version of this, too. Russia has a fairly robust IT sector. Or, did. A large number of IT professionals left Russia when the war kicked off.
Who does the backing up
Colocation facilities(Equinix, Digital Realty) rent space, power, and cooling. They do not back up tenant data. Each tenant runs its own backups.
Cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) replicate storage automatically. S3, for example, copies objects across at least three availability zones. That protects against hardware and facility failure, but it is not a backup: a deletion or ransomware encryption replicates too. Point-in-time backups are something the customer configures.
Enterprise-owned data centers set their own backup policy, usually defined per system.
Typical frequency
Critical databases (payments, orders): continuous replication to a second site, plus transaction log backups every 5 to 15 minutes. RPO is near zero to a few minutes.
Standard business systems: daily incremental backups and weekly full backups.
Snapshots: hourly or daily for virtual machines and storage volumes, kept for days to weeks.
Archives and compliance data: monthly or yearly copies, retained for years. Healthcare and financial records often require 6 to 10 years.
Where backups are stored
The common rule is 3-2-1: three copies, on two types of media, with one copy offsite. Many organizations now use 3-2-1-1, where the extra copy is immutable or air-gapped to survive ransomware.
On-site backup appliances or disk arrays for fast restores (Data Domain, Rubrik, Cohesity).
A second data center or cloud region, usually hundreds of miles away so one regional event (earthquake, hurricane, grid failure) cannot take out both.
Cloud object storage, often cold tiers such as S3 Glacier or Azure Archive, which are cheap to store and slow to retrieve.
Tape (LTO cartridges), still widely used for long-term and air-gapped copies. Tapes are often shipped to vaulting companies such as Iron Mountain. Large cloud providers also use tape internally for archive tiers.
Immutable storage (S3 Object Lock, WORM settings), which blocks modification or deletion for a set retention period.4
u/snoo-boop 19h ago
Ignoring the AI slop,
A large number of IT professionals left Russia when the war kicked off.
Yandex in particular lost a lot of senior people to the West starting in 2014. Not to mention their office in Kyiv being cut off in 2022.
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u/sexinsuburbia 14h ago
I’ve worked in tech for 20+ years and had to write DR/HA plans for apps I managed. It’s not slop. I’m not an infrastructure guy, worked adjacent to it. Been in enough meetings. This is generally how it works.
Every org/system is different. Same with data and application criticality.
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u/poukai 20h ago
According to Meduza (https://meduza.io/en/cards/ukraine-strikes-a-data-center-operated-by-russian-tech-giant-yandex-how-vulnerable-is-russia-s-internet-to-further-drone-attacks) Yandex backs up their data over four different availability zones. But... this doesn't happen automatically for tenants, so it is up to the different institutions using Yandex cloud to do backups and I wouldn't be surprised if several of the tenants have assumed that one glacier instance and one hot storage instance would be enough, conveniently ignoring the fact that they are both hosted in the same facility.
The fact that the Yandex availability zones are ru-central1-(a,b,d,e,m) doesn't fill me with confidence about the geographical distribution.
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u/sexinsuburbia 14h ago
Yup, there’s going to be redundancy. And there’s going to be tiers of data driving backup frequency. Like if Reddit suffered a catastrophic un-data-centering event, archived comments from 15 years ago aren’t going to pop back online first.
Tenants of any decent size should have backup procedures in place. Anyone with dedicated infrastructure teams should have recovery plans in place for all their systems. Smaller tenants maybe not.
It’s going to be more interesting how they are going to manage capacity. Even if data is recoverable, the existing network is going to be absolutely slammed.
The more data centers Ukraine takes out, the deeper impacts are going to be. It’ll literally be seeing the Internet back 20-years for them. Commute costs are going to skyrocket.
No idea how they are going to source chips or fund new buildouts in a war economy.
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u/YuppieFerret 20h ago
Good processes to ensure reliability, redundancy and recovery like you wrote above is hopefully not a focus area for a company within a corrupt war economy.
That shit is hard to maintain and require plenty of money and will from every part of the company to uphold. If they made shortcuts and quick solutions, the data can easily be permanently lost if the wrong stuff got blown up.
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u/petr_bena 9h ago
I can confidently tell you some HW is 20 times more expensive
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u/INITMalcanis 8h ago
Russia can pay for it, but it will be a large chunk of their rapidly diminishing gold reserves. I don't see why any potential supplier would settle for rubles, that's for sure!
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u/endbit 21h ago
I had a storage array quote triple from the end of last year to the beginning of this year and good for two weeks or even one week quotes since. I'd love to get 2x pricing on rack gear form last purchase and I'm not even in a sanctioned country.
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u/Aware-Palpitation536 15h ago
Storage, ram and graphics cards are out to lunch. Some pricing hasn't changed much (network cables, server racks, etc.).
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u/Kalkin93 1d ago
6 months of reduced bots? Awesome, let's make it even longer
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u/vand_cykel_ubaad 21h ago edited 21h ago
Could you all please just stop spreading this "reduced bots" nonsense.
Misinformation is still misinformation, even if it is pro ukraine.
There's countless articles, documentation and technical experts that all explain it, it will literally only take you two seconds to duckduckgo the information.
Shit, even the graph that the EU rep was spreading, was an AI generated graph that was wrong and he is/was getting roasted for it on twitter.
Yes, there was a slight reduction of bot activity, but it's not the influencer or malicious ones. It was basically just search and data scrapers.
Edit:
Here's a link, where you fucking midwits can't claim is "muh muh russia", it's fucking Mother Jones:
The underlying claim, in other words, was that a great deal of political activity online across a number of countries is inauthentic and led by Russian bots. Their sudden alleged silencing was a simple, feel-good story amidst the endless fight against online disinformation.
The only problem was that it simply wasn’t true.
Tech experts quickly explained that the “bots” that had been taken offline by the Yandex strike were actually bot crawlers, also known as web crawlers, which continually browse the internet in order to index web pages. A widely circulated chart from Cloudflare, the infrastructure company, did indeed show a drop in traffic from Yandex’s servers, which made sense; both the company’s web crawlers and search index requests were disrupted by the bombing campaign.
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u/SteelCrow 21h ago
Source for your assumptions?
And why does a 10 month account have less than 2000 karma and hidden messages?
Are you russian?
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u/MaltySines 4h ago
Think this through for two seconds before posting. The Russians would be happy to keep everyone thinking their bots have been greatly reduced while they're still operational. It would make everyone more likely to think bot activity is genuine if they assume the bot farm burned down.
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u/DkMomberg 1d ago edited 23h ago
They will just move it to another datacenter. Maybe even one in Belarus or something similar.
Edit: typo
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u/Sanity_in_Moderation 23h ago
They can only move to a backup within their own network. The Russian internet was built from the ground up to have top down control. It is highly centralized and the real guts of it are incompatible with the rest of the world. They literally can't just move it to a data center in China.
Aside from the simple fact that it's illegal for all of the large scale providers to do business with Russia. And it's illegal in Russia to have Russian data services based outside of Russia. And the Yandex processes were all proprietary and incompatible with AWS (for example).
The death of the bots is fantastic and may have an effect on the midterms. But what is more important is that the Russian country will have to run with extreme fuel shortages, no winter harvest, and now no stable internet. Their whole damn shit show is about to hit the fan.
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u/big-papito 22h ago
That would be unwise. There is no guarantee Russia's grip on Belarus will stay there for long.
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u/ravnhjarta 1d ago
- Strike more data centers
- Ukraine will be watching for when they make new ones.
- Let em have it, every single time.
The amount of damage the bot plague / tampering in political venues is beyond measure, they deserve every bit of wrath.
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u/stevew14 18h ago
We are going to end up with underground data centers aren't we?
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u/ravnhjarta 9h ago
I have been wondering that as well. Less environmental/noise impact, but more hardened vs tampering/attacks.
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u/vand_cykel_ubaad 21h ago edited 21h ago
The amount of damage the bot plague / tampering in political venues is beyond measure, they deserve every bit of wrath.
You never interact or see those bots that were shut down. They were basically search and data scrapers. That "lower activity" on social media is just your bias.
The information and explanation is on the internet, use 2 minutes to search for it on any search engine.
Here's a link, where you fucking midwits can't claim is "muh muh russia", it's fucking Mother Jones:
The underlying claim, in other words, was that a great deal of political activity online across a number of countries is inauthentic and led by Russian bots. Their sudden alleged silencing was a simple, feel-good story amidst the endless fight against online disinformation.
The only problem was that it simply wasn’t true.
Tech experts quickly explained that the “bots” that had been taken offline by the Yandex strike were actually bot crawlers, also known as web crawlers, which continually browse the internet in order to index web pages. A widely circulated chart from Cloudflare, the infrastructure company, did indeed show a drop in traffic from Yandex’s servers, which made sense; both the company’s web crawlers and search index requests were disrupted by the bombing campaign.
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u/ApokalypseCow 23h ago
It's just funny to me that, in helping us by wiping out so much of Russia's influence over the US, they are helping also themselves, just a few months down the road after the election they are helping to secure.
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u/Commercial_Ad_3687 22h ago
They are also helping your funny relatives with the free healthcare across the pond...
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u/BaronVonHumungus 22h ago
This is the 4D chess term people like to overuse .:. Wipe out the means of the propaganda and you lift the veil from people’s eyes
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u/throw667 1d ago
So in five months and two weeks, another strike.
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u/Thedumbass_the5th 23h ago
I assume there are other data centers across russia they can strike in the meanwhile.
Those seem like really good targets with rather huge effect and as it turns out, takes rather long to get those up again.
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u/OGLikeablefellow 1d ago
Russia has been behind every problem America has faced since 911. Prove me wrong
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u/big-papito 22h ago
Russia has been the source of pain and suffering around the world for decades. Everything they do is for the purpose of fucking someone over, profiting, or colonizing. This kind of comment on Reddit inevitably brings out the "but what about 'Muricah!" crowd, but they won't be able to point to an analog of Russian, say, USAID (rip).
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u/YSoMadTov 22h ago
Russia has been the cancer of the world since the last 3 centuries, prove me wrong.
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u/Ok_Bad8531 7h ago
To be fair, by the 18th, to some degree the 19th century Russia was just one of a couple of particularily nasty countries in eastern Europe / Asia to live in. The Ottomans for example at times could make Russia look tame. But while much of the world progressed Russia remained stuck, and often took over the worst new political ideas that came to be or perverted well-meaning ones beyond recognition.
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u/Slut_for_Bacon 23h ago
I think "behind every problem" is a strong phrase.
But in essence I agree. Russia has been stoking racial and political tensions in an obvious attempt to destabilize our democracy. Likely way more than just that. But at least that.
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u/0bverse 1d ago
Region loss is bad; but presumably most critical russian services (banking, payments, utilities, logistics) have on-prem DR capabilities- its not like nobody ever thought that this may happen. And presumably they could start services in Belarus and Kazakhstan without risk of attack. Bots seem likely to come back online once they can get allocated resources on other data centers. Every bank in europe must be converting pantries back into machine rooms. Springtime for VMware.
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u/AstronomerSweet2133 1d ago
wait until its almost fixed, and do it again, like the Russian submarineship did something to itself.
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u/hapnstat 1d ago
Good luck replacing that shit. They'll be lucky to do it at any price in six months.
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u/Transfigured-Tinker 1d ago
Please make it 60 years until they learn to behave collegially with everyone.
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u/Medium_Proof7304 1d ago
Elon musk probably racing to the front of the line to get some space x data centers built for them
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u/p-d-ball 1d ago
so much depends
upon
the series of
gpu
melting in roaring
fires
inside the soulless
datacenters
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u/White_Null 7h ago
There’s also the fact that NVIDIA left Russia on the first wave of the companies exiting early 2022.
And those NVIDIA chips are Made in Taiwan! Nope nope nope! 🇹🇼 Abiding by sanctions and prosecuting chip smugglers! Even if none. Back of the line.
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u/Badgerman97 1d ago
I’m sure Trump will send some spare parts for a couple barrels of oil. After all, he needs the extra clicks too
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u/browning_88 1d ago
Not if you keep bombing them..the maga slam phone calls to my phone have reduced drastically
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u/dano1066 21h ago
That’s assuming Ukraine doesn’t blow up more of it in the next few months and the global shortages in server hardware doesn’t also bite them
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u/MandeliciousXTC 18h ago
Trump is going to be angry 98% of his online fan base have been wiped out before the midterms.
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u/EddieV223 7h ago
If it takes them 6 months to replace, you can guarantee it'll never be operational again until Ukraine decides to not hit it anymore or the war ends. Keeping them offline indefinitely is no problemo.
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u/spin_kick 1d ago
6 months to blow them all up
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u/philip_laureano 1d ago
Meanwhile, I am 100% certain that Ukraine can manufacture the same drones that destroyed those Yandex facilities faster than they can rebuild them.
Seems about right to me
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u/cpt_koerg 1d ago
I bet China already provided complete decentral container daracenter fully equipped already.
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