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)."

Comments

So Cloud v Cloud....

[artor3]

...nature wins?

Re:So Cloud v Cloud....

[SMoynihan]

I live in Dublin, and that was some seriously targeted lightning. No sign of storms here, that I saw...

Just imitiating Verizon.

[DWMorse]

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.

Cloud fail

[Baloroth]

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.

Re:Cloud fail

[HTMLSpinnr]

For EC2, it's only distributed if you pay to have your "service" running in more than one availability zone.

Re:Cloud fail

[Wolfling1]

Ah, yes. There is that.

At the moment, my company is aggressively encouraging our customers to avoid the Cloud at all costs. Let me explain why.

Whilst the technology exists for the cloud to deliver fault tolerant distributed storage, when you choose to put data in the cloud, you are choosing to relinquish control of the data. You are placing it in the hands of someone else. Quite probably an organisation that you do not know intimately. Quite probably an organisation that is based in a different legislative region - probably another country.

You have little to no capacity to audit their system. You have little to no capacity to test their fault tolerance. And here's the sucker punch - you have little to no legal comeback for the consequences if something bad happens.

If your data contains any personal information about another person, you are placing the privacy of that person in the hands of an organisation you do not control, and upon whom you cannot enforce any legislative restrictions.

So, unless you are seriously geared up to investigate and audit your prospective cloud provider - and they are willing for you to do so, the only data you can safely put in the cloud is data that would be basically irrelevant to your core business anyway. Until the fundamental issues of privacy, security and accountability are resolved - or dramatically improved - placing core business data in the Cloud is a massive corporate risk.

They should not have called it the 'Cloud'. They should have called it the 'Arse' - because if your management are planning to stick their heads in one, they may as well stick their heads up the other. I don't imagine that 'Arse Computing' would be as popular though.

Microsoft renamed its product

[countertrolling]

Office 364

Re:My Sympathies

[kent_eh]

I've been in the same spot. (10KW, 3 tower array). It's amazing how far the parts of a capacitor on a P&M panel can spread when propelled by a lightning strike.
Even with ball gaps, chokes, and all the other effort, ultimately the transmitter has to be connected to the tower. 50 ohms is not that much different than "the shortest path to ground" when you put a few thousand KV against it.

It took several years after my career change to enjoy the spectacle of a lightning storm

Power Co-Generation

[anubi]

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.

How shocking!

[NicknamesAreStupid]

This is not the first time -- http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/06/11/lightning-strike-triggers-amazon-ec2-outage/ .

Re:at that level the safety's tipped foreing a man

[Animats]

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?

marketing bullshit

[Tom]

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".