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

Quite a large range of safe...

[SuperKendall]

West coast has earthquakes. Midwest has tornadoes. Northeast has blizzards and nor'easters

There is quite a lot of geologically stable space entirely lacking in natural disasters between "West" and "Midwest". Like all of Utah and Colorado and New Mexico and Arizona (leaving out Wyoming because of the supervolcano).

Locating in Virginia probably gives them a cheaper supply of power though.

Hardening against a cat5 hurricane is probably a decent tradeoff for them.

Re:Priorities

[pillageplunder]

Well, Typically a Hurricane leaves a larger footprint than a Tornado, in that a larger area is affected, and also the duration of a Hurricane is much longer than that of a Tornado. Yes, an F5 tornado is much more powerful and destructive than a Cat 5 Hurricane, but given how much longer a hurricane will be over a given area, it's likely that damage will be roughly equal.
Bad news either way you slice it.