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Lightning Strike KOs Amazon, Microsoft EuroClouds
1sockchuck writes "A lightning strike has caused power outages at the major cloud computing data hubs for Amazon and Microsoft in Dublin, Ireland. The incident has caused downtime for many sites using Amazon's EC2 cloud computing platform and Microsoft's BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite)."
...nature wins?
I see how it is. Verizon workers go on strike, MSFT and Amazon gotta call in for something strike-related that's bigger and flashier. Show-offs.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
Considering that my radio stations have been getting hammered for weeks now by this horrible weather in the Southern United States, my sympathies are with them.
I don't care how much protection you put on your system (and when you have giant lightning rods that are hundreds of feet tall, like we do, you DO try to protect things), an occasional strike is going to slip through. When it does it can get ... messy. :)
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
Sounds about like
http://xkcd.com/908/
My understanding of the point of cloud computing was that it would be distributed. I.e. the failure of any one data or computing center would mean the data was still available. Hence, the term "cloud": nebulous, non-localized. Apparently, someone forgot to tell Microsoft and Amazon what the buzzwords they were using actually mean. I more or less expected that of M$, but the fact that Amazon failed too, well, thats pretty a little surprising. I guess it's kinda the norm for all large corporations.
Glancing at the article, it looks like this outage effected only a certain area, but still, cloud should mean other data centers would take over. I particularly love the quote "Dublin has become a key cloud computing gateway." If one city serves as a "gateway", its not a cloud system. I understand using it as one data center, but others should take over automatically for that area in case of a failure. If you don't have a failover system, you don't have a real cloud computing platform. You have a wannabe cloud computing platform. Or maybe they are just taking a buzzword and redefining it to suit their purposes. That's... exactly what we should expect, I suppose.
Or am I completely misunderstanding the meaning of this latest buzzword? It's quite possible, I never quite got down what "Web 2.0" was supposed to mean either. Beyond lots and lots of Flash.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Have you ever seen a surge protector after a direct strike? The MOVs don't help much once they vaporize.
A surge protector is mostly useful against the more common near misses.
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Those massive data centers only existed because Microsoft and Amazon channeled profits through Irish subsidiaries to avoid US taxes. They serve some legitimate functions for customers in the UK as a matter of convenience (why build two data centers?), but they're primarily money laundering centers.
I'd call a few lightning strikes the least of the punishments those data centers - and the entire infrastructures to which they're attached - really deserve.
True enough. I was just trying to eke out a static + clouds = lighting joke.
While working at Chevron Oil Pascagoula Mississippi refinery, I noted Chevron had the same problem. Loss of electrical power to the refinery would be catastrophic. No one wants to be around tons of petrochemical products undergoing serious chemical reactions when one loses control.
To mitigate this threat, Chevron worked with Mississippi Power to operate a power generation facility at the refinery.
I would think that anywhere there is a substantial "data processing farm" with critical power requirements, business arrangements should be made with the power generation utilities to run a natgas power plant in the immediate area.
The utilities often run these plants as "topping" plants, as they needed anyway to even out short-time load variances on the line.
But, in the event of a serious loss of grid power, it can be awful handy to have a few megawatts of power coming from down the street.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
This is not the first time -- http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/06/11/lightning-strike-triggers-amazon-ec2-outage/ .
Yes. When an EC2 instance is "turned off" it's destroyed, along with any data- unless you're using an EBS volume (the special provision) which is persistent, or S3. Not to say that there couldn't be issues with the data on those either, in the face of an extremely sudden, unexpected shutdown. Shutting off an EC2 instance is equivalent to deleting a VMware VM. You then have to start a new one from a template (AMI).
Depends on your needs, if you need capacity only occasionally or have a workload where the peak is an order of magnitude or more from the base then it can make perfect sense to use a cloud provider, it's not like multisite replication and large amounts of bandwidth are cheap when you do them yourself.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Also Surge Protectors can't really take a direct lighting strike.
But lightning arrestors can. A serious lightning arrestor is a spark gap (sometimes open air, sometimes in an inert gas) to ground, with a very heavy cable or busbar to multiple ground rods, and no sharp turns in the path to ground. This is followed up by an inductor which is a few turns of busbar. This gear is usually placed where power lines or antenna feeds enter a building. MOV-type protection is further downstream.
Antenna towers are struck by lightning frequently, and the associated radio gear routinely continues to operate. This isn't rocket science. It's big hunks of copper.
The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company, in their publication "The Locomotive" (they've been at this since 1867) has a good article on lightning protection. Hartford Steam Boiler insures not only against boiler explosions, but things like downtime due to lightning strikes. But only after their inspectors (they have 1200) have visited the plant and are satisfied with the equipment.
A question to ask your "cloud" provider - who handles your business interruption insurance, and do they inspect your faclities?
Despite ALl the market-hype and brew-haha going on, the simple fact remains:
If ALL your computing power is in ONE SINGLE DATACENTRE then what you have is a DAMP SPOT not a CLOUD.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
And there is the marketing bullshit revealed. All the promises of the cloud - down by one lightning strike.
Because, let's face it, the whole "cloud" thing as they sell it is just advanced virtual hosting with a different name. The only real cloud capabilities are those the big companies build for themselves, and they did things like that 10 years ago already, when nobody had ever heard the term "cloud" used in computing contexts.
In the end, it's about selling something to people who already have the older version and convincing them to buy the new one. So you give it a different name because a "new" product sells easier than the upgraded version of an "old" product.
Anyone remember when "Web 2.0" was all the hype? It really wasn't a 2.0 as we all know. There was nothing new in it, all components had been around for a long time. It was a conceptual bundle, but not a new version like the name suggested.But "we're doing more Javascript" now doesn't sell nearly as good as "we're moving to Web 2.0 now".
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Looks like the old "Good, fast, cheap: pick two" adage might need a little rewording. How about "Fast, reliable, cheap: pick two"?
Since when was "reliable" anything other than one of the classic metrics for "good"? The old adage needs no changes at all.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Business Productivity Online Suite?
I always thought it stood for "Big Piece of Sh..... never mind