Could a Category 5 Hurricane Take Down East Coast Data Centers?

TheNextCorner writes "With more data moving into the cloud, there is an increasing danger of data loss when one of these cloud computing data centers fails. Hurricanes pose a real threat to infrastructure located in Virginia and North Carolina, where Google, Apple & Facebook have opened large data centers. 'Where would the most damaging hit be? It's debatable, but the most detrimental hit may be in Virginia. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has one of their major centers in Northern Virginia. ... In a study involving millions of people, a third of those surveyed reported visiting a website every day that used Amazon's infrastructure. In 2011, Amazon's S3 cloud stored 762 billion objects. It's possible that Amazon's cloud alone holds an entire 1% of the Internet.' Could a category 5 Hurricane become a problem for these cloud data centers and take down parts the Internet?"

Comments

Priorities

[Roachie]

A Cat 5 impacts the East Coast and we are worried that Facebook or Amazon might be down?

Re:Priorities

[Desler]

1/2 mil can die.. that's fine. As long my business model doesn't temporarily fail! That's the 'merican way!

Exaggerate much? There haven't been 500000 deaths due to hurricanes in the US even if you combine all fatalities over a hundred year period.

Re:Priorities

[HAKdragon]

Well considering the amount of web sites and services that have "Login with Facebook" these days...
 
(Yeah yeah, the slashdot/tech knowledgeable crowd either uses per site login option or avoids those sites)

Re:Priorities

[fnj]

Hurricanes are not comparable in ANY way to tornadoes.

Nobody who knows anything about the subject thinks wind outright wrecking structures is the largest worry in a big hurricane. That does happen, but the largest worry is coastal flooding due to wind driven surge, combined with PROLONGED power outage over a LARGE area. Often, ridiculously heavy and prolonged downpours over a large area add a delayed punch due to river flooding. None of that is a factor at all with tornadoes.

They are both bad. In different ways, and on a different geographical scale.

Re:Priorities

[DNS-and-BIND]

You forgot the part where a Cat 5 hurricane is HUNDREDS of miles wide, whereas a tornado is a hundred feet, if that. A hurricane also lasts for hours while a tornado lasts for a few seconds. Other than that, yeah, it's not nearly on the same scale. The tornado, I mean.

Probably not.

[GodInHell]

First, these companies probably have catastrophic recovery plans in place. Amazon, in particular, is not know for just sitting around leaving its business blowing in the wind.

Second, the loss might slow down the internet, but unless the data hosted at these data centers was unique (which is unlikely) then the other data sites just pick up the slack. Again, that might be slower, but it wouldn't result in loss of data or "teh internet." That is to say, they will act like every other functional part of the internet, route around the damage and carry on.

Re:Cloud is supposed to have REDUNDANCY!

[SecurityGuy]

This is actually one of the major risks with "cloud". When you run your own data centers, you can touch the hardware, talk to the people, and check behind them to make sure things are actually being done right. In the worst case with cloud, you simply trust that "their data is safe", when in fact it might not be at all. In the less bad case, you get a nice contract with SLAs that specify exactly what data being safe means, and what recourse you have if they blow it. This is still not great, because if the past 5 years have taught you nothing else, they should have taught you that YES companies will make bets that end their business if they bet wrong.

I wouldn't say don't use the so-called cloud providers. Just don't naively believe they're doing everything right just because they haven't had a catastrophic failure or screwed up YOUR data yet.