Slashdot Mirror
Lightning Strikes Amazon's Cloud (Really)
The Register has details on a recent EC2 outage that is being blamed on a lightning strike that zapped a power distribution unit of the data center. The interruption only lasted around 6 hours, but the irony should last much longer. "While Amazon was correcting the problem, it told customers they had the option of launching new server instances to replace those that went down. But customers were also able to wait for their original instances to come back up after power was restored to the hardware in question."
Do any of you know how an instance could survive a power outage? Surely every operation is written out to disk before it's performed..so how did they design it?
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
Just so people know, this can be a real bitch.
I took a direct lightning strike at one site I work with that entered the corner of the building, traveled down the inside wall leaving a scorch mark on two levels and into the basement where all the servers and switches were located. The lightening then traveled through the electrical service main lines to an encased transformer located in the parking lot next door causing it to explode with enough force that is shattered the windows of the bank building next door and a door panel was found on a rood about a block away. It appears that one half of the electrical system was grounded properly through a specific ground rod and the other half was tied into the plumbing that ran inches away from the lightning rod grounds. When they purchased the building, they didn't redo all the electrical on the side of the building that wasn't remodeled and that way of grounding was normal.
We lost 3 of the 5 servers instantly and couldn't keep the other two stable. Both switches were down, 20 of the 44 workstations along with the tape backup machine, copiers, and networked printers were completely dead when we got there. The entire building had a lightning/surge protector with battery backup and natural gas generator on the mains so they weren't too concerned over in house specific protections. Only the systems with UPS on them directly survived with the exceptions of the servers which I'm not sure if they died from the lightning strike or from getting soaked by the fire sprinklers that was set off by the strike. (surprisingly, there was no fire).
It took us two days at almost 20 hours a day among 5 people with a lot of borrowing from other sites, about 20 trips to five or six computer stores in the surrounding counties, and a generator to come back on line and be operational again. We even had a make shift phone system in place while waiting on a new Avaya to come in. We did this all before the electric company got the transformer replaced and service back on. Until we replaced the other machines that were thought not to be effected, we experienced all sorts of weird behavior on the network and I'm still not confident with the cabling even though it passed the testing. Of course I didn't run the certification so it might just be me not trusting others.
If you get a direct strike, you might as well count on replacing everything in a production environment. When I say direct strike, I mean evidence it actually hit the building and not something down the road and traveled to the building. It will be easier and cheaper in the long run. Now, I have as part of the catastrophe plan, a means to replace every computer and component on the network at one time just to be safe. If it wasn't for two other sites having the same tape drives, we would have had to wait a week for a replacement to come in and start the data recovery process. Thank god for off-site tape storage.