Tornado Risk Seen For Social Security Data Center

1sockchuck writes "Despite the recent outbreak of powerful tornadoes, the Social Security Administration has decided to engineer its new data center to withstand winds of just 90 miles per hour. Data center experts say mission-critical facilities should be built to withstand winds of 120 to 180 miles per hour to protect against tornado and hurricane risks. It's the latest in a series of challenges for the $800 million project, which will replace a creaky 30-year old facility."

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Re:Trailers

[rtb61]

Modern building engineering, everything is down to actual location, including surrounding buildings and geography. To say you are designing to 90 miles an hour doesn't mean much and is likely taken out of context. Now days thanks to computers each elevation is designed separately as well as taking into account different loading at different locations on the building, be it the apex the eaves, mid point of the building etc. Now add to this safety factors which is added on top of environmental conditions, based upon use and life of building and are built into the calculations to be used.

So commentary upon building engineering by a computer expert (definitely a drip under pressure) who knows little to nothing about building design.

Realistically though any Federal infrastructure should be evenly distributed between states with each state facility acting as backup for adjoining the states and of course fairly distributing the income from Federal spending. The big cost with these facilities is not data storage, but data input and output ie people at keyboards. Replicating the data stored fifty times really doesn't add that much cost. The extra cost of fifty data centres tends to balance out because there are plenty of existing buildings near state capitals that can be fitted out, employees are far more accessible and infrastructure design becomes much simpler (great system redundancy).