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Hurricane Irene Threatens US Northeast; Cover Your Assets
jfruhlinger writes "Hurricane Irene is bearing down on the heavily populated U.S. Northeast Corridor. If you work in IT, you know that there are few things that are worse for electronics than water; so, what's your plan? Tom Henderson has come up with a checklist, which sensibly includes backing everything up, twice; not that you have time for it now, but for future reference you might want to consider just moving your whole data center to a location that's been conveniently pre-hardened, like a water tower or a boiler room." Note that Irene has been no joke in the Caribbean; in Puerto Rico (with relatively modern infrastructure), about a third of the island lost power.
I don't worry about Hurricanes, I have TornadoGuard on my iPhone.
What about placing data centers in areas with no possibilty of earthquakes, hurricanes, floods or anything! Seems to work for some people. The only danger then are idiots, but that's impossible to run from.
The Northeast? Threatened? I wholeheartedly guffaw at the though. Hurricanes end up in the New England area whenever they don't sputter out on the way up. They're shadows of their former selves when they get here as cold northern waters neuter the hurricane. We get 1-2 days of rain and that's it. The storms are never anything we have to feel threatened by here. Call again in winter, we'll show you the storms we New Englanders actually fear.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
Yeah right, power and telecom frequently go out in a moderate thunderstorm down there. I have a coworker that's dealt with many offices at three different employers over the last 15 years and they've all had the same kinds of problems. The solution is to UPS everything and just not sweat it when the offices down there lose internet because you will NOT be able to get someone to respond in under 4 hours like you will stateside.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
In what way is that particular XKCD obligatory?
An appropriate xkcd mention would go more like this:
I'm not worried. I think it's just that there's too many people constantly refreshing the weather radar. xkcd.com/831/
Knowledge Brings Fear
My company ordered all of our servers Scotchgarded last year for just such an emergency!
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Irene gets weaker as she crosses more states with gay marriage, and apparently stops dead at the US/Canada border. Googling for Santorum confirms.
Puertorican here, and yes, Irene didn't even hit us directly and caused MAJOR damage. I'm talking about landslides, rivers going crazy, floods, trees falling, and all the disaster you can imagine, plus no water and electricity for days (at one point 92% of PR was without power). Puerto Rico builds it's houses and buildings out of cement, not wood (rural areas are most likely to be made out of wood, but rarely), so this is just crazy weather we're having. Hope you guys up there hang on tight.
http://xkcd.com/937/
I have plenty of grits stored up to help handle the hurricane. I can pour hot girts down my pants for at least two weeks without having to go to the store.
I'm going to sleep.
I thought it was Ilene?
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
Where are the "cloud" servers located? It would suck if you backed to Dropbox, Google Docs, or whatever, and Irene wiped THOSE out, along with your local hardware.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
you know that there are few things that are worse for electronics than water
That's such a crock. Saltwater is actually an excellent conductor of electricity. Electronics need good conductors. Hence, electronics need saltwater.
So relax and stop it with all that plywood and tarp. Have a beer instead.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
i've been through a few hurricanes in NYC and we have these things called windows to keep the water out. it's a rectangular hole cut into the building with multiple panes of glass with a metal frame and some sealing material around it.
in some instances if there are extremely high winds predicted we put packing tape on the windows in an X shape in order to prevent shatter
Our IT guys assured us we are OK. Cheetos absorb 47 times their weight in water.
Have gnu, will travel.
Lay in supplies of wadded beef, creamed eels, and corn nog to feed the IT staff shackled to the A/C units.
"consider just moving your whole data center to a location that's been conveniently pre-hardened, like a water tower or a boiler room."
So, move it to a place where if something does go wrong, in addition to the disaster you also have a huge tank of water nearby to douse your whole center? I'm not so sure I'd like that idea.
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
So .. in the last few days we've had Tornados, Earthquakes and now a Hurricane? Someone is pissed at us.
[alk]
...Altamonte Springs, FL put their data center in a decommissioned concrete water tank, located at grade, not an elevated tower.
yay hurricane season, exciting! *gets popcorn* great to be a european!
Obligatory Simpsons References.
All my servers and data are kept in the clouds.
Which, as you know, are way above sea level.
No man is an island, But if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie them together, they make a pretty good raft.
"Note that Irene has been no joke in the Caribbean; in Puerto Rico (with relatively modern infrastructure), about a third of the island lost power."
Dont fucking insult me. Relatively modern infrastructure? We don't build our buildings with fucking wood and gypsum board... We use armed concrete... that is why we can take a Category 5 Hurricane (like Hugo) or Category 4 (like Georges or Katrina) and survive it without the DRAMA the US experienced with Katrina... When we get a hurricane like that, we receive it with Don Q Rum and in a Beach Chair...
Now If you had said that the island was a step up from a third world country, I couldn't agree with you more... If the goverment agencies did their job right one third of the island wouldn't have lost power and water for more than a day... The services down there are such a fucking joke compared to 20yrs ago when a Category 5 Hurricane would cause the same inconveniences that this Category 1 hurricane caused.
Don't let me get started on the "puppet" we got as a governor... he makes Obama look competent...
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
Earthquakes on the east coast, an impending hurricane too, then Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple, CmdrTaco gone too...... I think the apocalypse is upon us.
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
Here is one of the best and most comprehensive writeups of how to prepare and weather safely through Hurricane irene. http://www.soulneeds.com/articles/view?id=600
I don't expect this to be much worse to be honest.
You'd better hope you're right -- and away from the water. If you're wrong, you could end up five feet above sea level with a fifteen-foot storm surge, and need to swim in 100 mph winds and twenty-foot seas.
Don't forget, emergency services (police, ambulance, fire, ...) suspend their services during these severe storms, so there's no help available (even if your phone service still works). The definition of pitiful is recordings of 911 calls made during the landfall of almost any major hurricane. People in fear for their lives, begging to be saved, and the 911 operator can do nothing. . . .
A sufficiently "virtualised" data centre could potentially be distributed around the country/world, negating any local effects, naturally for any clients willing to pay a disaster premium.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Can't wait to see the orange-stained pools afterwards. Something tells me they'll look positively radioactive.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
http://goatkcd.com/865/
You forgot the step involving the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.
Let us not have a repeat of the disaster in Japan from all of you angry users.
We are working to restore services but your T1 circuit is not more important than a natural disaster.
I do not like telling a customer that we can not restore service because their fiber is buried beneath a stack of human corpses. So please, have some concern for your fellow man and realize...I do not give two shits until you recognize that human life is more valuable than some glass.
Sincerely, Every Major Carrier
The generation that operated in finance during the 1929 crash had passed away. Note, their kids are still alive; but they weren't actually on Wall Street. Those kids remember the hurricane of 1938 and told some of us about it. My mom was riding a streetcar in Worcester, MA which was forced to stop in that howling wind and rain. She was terrified. This is many miles inland from the ocean, and definitely New England. The real victims were on Long Island. I've been told they still find bits and pieces from houses that used to be there.
Of course now there are no streetcars, and if there were people would have warning enough not to ride them. Back then? Nothing but vague reports from ships at sea, some notion that something bad might be coming...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Note that Irene has been no joke in the Caribbean; in Puerto Rico (with relatively modern infrastructure), about a third of the island lost power.
Dont fucking insult me. Relatively modern infrastructure? We don't build our buildings with fucking wood and gypsum board... We use armed concrete... that is why we can take a Category 5 Hurricane (like Hugo) or Category 4 (like Georges or Katrina) and survive it without the DRAMA the US experienced with Katrina... When we get a hurricane like that, we receive it with Don Q Rum and in a Beach Chair...
Bullshit. I was there for Hugo and Georges. Hugo when it hit PR was a category 3, but it barely scraped the northeastern tip of the island (close to Fajardo). The Vieques and Culebra islands got hit the hardest, followed by the eastern municipalities, and the rest of the island got off easy. My street was without power for over a month afterward.
Georges was category 3 when it hit PR, too, not a 5. That did cut diagonally right through the middle of the main island. My parent's house lost a crappy zinc roof used in an extension that they should've never made to the house.
Now If you had said that the island was a step up from a third world country, I couldn't agree with you more... If the goverment agencies did their job right one third of the island wouldn't have lost power and water for more than a day... The services down there are such a fucking joke compared to 20yrs ago when a Category 5 Hurricane would cause the same inconveniences that this Category 1 hurricane caused.
Dude, 22 years ago when Hugo hit I was without power for a whole damn month. And I lived in a middle upper class neighborhood.
When it comes to hurricanes, the guys in PR who've got their shit down are Defensa Civil—the government emergency preparedness agency.
Are you adequate?
Katrina was a big storm, but not ridiculously so. What destroyed New Orleans was flooding made extra destructive by the fact that the city is below sea level.
...and what killed 1,464 people is that neither the city, nor the state, nor the feds had any freaking plan for evacuating people out of the city who couldn't do it by themselves. And that would've never happened in Puerto Rico. I mean, (a) classify the areas of the city beforehand by their vulnerability to a flood, (b) when the hurricane warning is issued, send out dudes in vans and buses to the most vulnerable places to order the residents out and take to shelters the ones who can't get out on their own.
Are you adequate?
According to a report, "New York City Natural Hazard Mitigation Plan Section III: Natural Hazard Risk Assessment", from March 2009:
"According to hurricane probability models, there is a 2.6% chance a hurricane will impact the New York City area (New York City, Westchester, and Long Island) during any given hurricane season. During a 50-year period there is a 13.6% chance a hurricane"
I guess that chance [sic] would have to be recalculated, fast.
Err wait....
Insightful...
I just went ahead and deleted everything beforehand. Nothing to back up and no possibility of data loss due to the storm!