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

Category 5 Hurricane

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Could a category 5 Hurricane become a problem for these cloud data centers and take down parts the Internet?"

Only if they haven't switched to Cat 6 cables yet.

Re:Category 5 Hurricane

[cayenne8]

What does this Bush-bashing have to do with anything? I don't see what point you're trying to make. And just to bring balance: There's flooding in the Northern midwest states right now and Obama's FEMA still hasn't done squat. (In fact he denied the governors' requests for emergency aid.) GOP or DNC; they both suck.

What Katrina illustrated to me first hand, and should have to everyone else by example is...when there is a disaster, you're really left to your own resources to save your own life, and recover afterwards.

Anyone that doesn't have flood insurance post Katrina, in an area that is prone to flooding, is a fool and deserves what they get if they don't have the insurance. Flood insurance is dead cheap, and you cannot be turned down.

Don't depends on anything else to come save you.....not only fiscally...but if you see a big storm coming your way...LEAVE. It isn't that big a deal...leave, think of it as a day or two vacation if it turns out to be a false alert and it doesn't hit you....but you can save your life by acting responsibly.

FEMA? Whew....what a cluster fsck dealing with them is...even on a GOOD day....

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

[Tyler Eaves]

Category 5 and F5 are very different beasts.

An F5 tornado is going to level,or at least mostly demolish, most buildings short of a concrete bunker.

A Category 5 hurricane is roughly equivalent to a low end F3 tornado - it will destroy weaker structures like prefab metal buildings and mobile homes, and perhaps de-roof and blow the windows out of more solid foundation-built structures. Still very bad news, but not on quite the same scale. Hurricanes do most the damage from flooding anyway, not the straightline winds.

Re:Priorities

[postbigbang]

You're right. Wasn't thinking.

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

[Sponge Bath]

500000 deaths due to hurricanes...

The original poster must have been using seasonal adjustments. Depending on the month, a category 5 hurricane can actually result in population growth.

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.

Re:Priorities

[postbigbang]

The mean time to recovery is something every person and organization has to answer for themselves. If primary office facilities go down, can users get (by remote control or physical presence) to an alternate site? Disaster recovery professionals have tried to apply science to how recovery works given differing scenarios. It doesn't have to be hurricane, tornado, heavy snow, or even weather-related issues at all; everyone's production surface is different-- although there are lots of commonalities.

Where I live, there are several strongly built data centers with generators and heavy fuel tanks, multiple grid connections, and so forth. Having an area available to get to, let alone logon to, might otherwise be a problem.

Backups? People do backups? I thought it was a lost art. Yet for every fat EMC can full of blinking drives, there is a backhoe looking for a spot marked X.

Re:Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like the baby boom that will occur around March 2013 from the storm that blacked out the DC area for a few days. With the lack of power I could hear my neighbors better. 4 of them are now expecting. Every time one of them says "we did not try to get pregnant" I want to slap them.

Re:Priorities

[Zephyn]

Once an F5 tornado pulls the roof off the server building, you'll really see how data migrates into the cloud.

Re:Priorities

[mcgrew]

I've been through both a cat 2 hurricane and a strong F2 tornado, and your description of an F3's damage is not in the least accurate. One commercial building was half gone and huge steel girders twisted like putty. two meter diameter trees uprooted. Roofs impaled by other roofs. A walk-in beer coolers torn from a bar. Buildings built out of concrete blocks destroyed. I left a link to a journal about both experiences further down, if you're interested in a first-hand account of what it's like to be in a hurricane and tornado.

The thing is, being inside a tornado is like being inside a giant blender with sticks and rocks and dead animals and splintered wood and even cars acting as the blender's blades.

An F5? Man, I would NOT want to be in one of those! I don't even want to be in any tornado again.

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.

Re:Priorities

[postbigbang]

There is the possibility you speak of. The data center is connected to the world (if well designed) through multiple routes with multiple carriers, who hopefully didn't use the same pipe or pole to mount their gear.

The amplification comes from context. There are low and high priority applications, and those used for entertainment. Communications like email, public safety, asset protection, all need to survive (no matter whose assets). Your streaming video can wait. But there are very few "concentrated" data centers. If you're in the business of depending on systems infrastructure, you hedged your bet. If you put all of your eggs into a single basket, there is the risk of an omelet.

But most organizations I know, don't do this. It's too risky. There are data centers across the planet these days, and plentiful redundancy. My own connections have not one, but seven NAP connections with TTL 3. It's backed up. But I'm in no way mission-critical or public safety. Look up how the DHS and FEMA security experts recommend it, and they're the "stupid" government. It's a low bar. Insurance companies demand (if they're smart) lots of redundancy and disaster planning to deal with interruptions. The plans and success/failure stories are out there. Read them.

Re:Priorities

[khallow]

There was the infamous Tri-state tornado, a tornado or perhaps chain of tornados, which left a path of destruction 234 miles long, as much as a mile wide (plus apparently damage further away due to heavy winds that extended significantly beyond the tornado itself), and lasted for around 3.5 hours. More importantly, it killed almost 700 people in an area not known for its population densities.

I think the amount of physical damage for this remarkable tornado is comparable to the worst of hurricanes or cyclones. If it had run through Bangladesh, it might kill 50-100,000 people and injure about three times more (just crudely assuming deaths are proportional to the increase in population density and assuming that in turn is an increase of two orders of magnitude from that region in 1925 midwest US to 2012 Bangladesh). The worst hurricane known, Hurrican Bhola which hit Bangladesh in 1970, killed about ten times as many people (and using the same crude estimates, would at least double in deaths due to at least a doubling of population density between 1970 and 2012 Bangladesh). In other words, it had the potential to cause about a twentieth as much deaths as the worst known hurricane by number of deaths.

It's worth remembering here that tornadoes tend to occur in areas with light population density, which greatly reduces their impact more than would be expected just by the smaller size of the tornado's affected area compared to a hurricane's affected area. There's also the matter of evacuation. Evacuating an area due to tornado threat doesn't make sense because the storms form over wide areas and tornados aren't at all predictable in where they appear and go. Hurricanes generally have several days of warning when heeded. That might not be enough to evacuate an area like Bangladesh's coast but it is good enough for the US and much of the world.

Such differences tend to increase the relative harm of tornadoes relative to hurricanes.

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:Probably not.

[aaarrrgggh]

It is more expensive to cross availability zones with Amazon, so many sites (foolishly) do not have geographic diversity.

Re:Think on the children

[PFactor]

Did you notice Iran is getting off the Internet? I think you know the answer to your question... /s

Cloud is supposed to have REDUNDANCY!

[na1led]

I've never heard of a major cloud storage facility that would keep all their servers in one location. They usually have all their data backed up to remote locations, usually far from their main site. We are taking about Amazon, and Google here, not Black Berry RIM. I'm sure their data is safe.

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.

You get what you pay for

[hawguy]

Anyone that hosts their entire web presence at Amazon Virginia (especially after the other outages they've had), or really, in any single Amazon region is getting what they pay for and what they deserve if there's a regional disaster.

It's not hard or expensive to have a cold- or warm- spare site in a different region ready to take over (even if it's a manual cutover), especially since Amazon's new(ish) US-West region in Oregon is the same price as US-East.

I like that Amazon lets me pay for the level of redundancy I need - a small bump for multiple availability zone within a single region redundancy, with a larger bump for multiple region redundancy. Not everything I do needs to ride out an East Coast hurricane, but for those things that do, it's really not hard to have a backup site in a different region.

Earth is seeking balance

[xzvf]

Global warming is caused by man building huge coal powered data centers, Earth sends hurricanes to destroy data centers, life on planet is saved.

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:Quite a large range of safe...

[cpu6502]

>>>leaving out Wyoming because of the supervolcano

If the supervolcano went off, the only states that would still be livable are the three Pacific ones. People living in Utah or Colorado or Arizona might survive the initial blow, but will die of ash inhalation a few days later. Same with everyone east of the supervolcano. ----- Even without the volcano I wouldn't say Utah Colorado Arizona are safe. Utah, Arizona often get hit with droughts. Colorado has huge snowstorms that leave people trapped in their homes.

Virginia & Carolina have cheap coal power. New York has cool summers to reduce air conditioning costs.

Re:Quite a large range of safe...

[Anonymous Coward]

North Carolina and Virginia are not at risk from a Category 5 Hurricane. A category 5 hurricane has never made landfall in North Carolina or Virginia, as a category 5 storm. The worst was a Category 2 landfall in 1960 and 2003, and only in North Carolina.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Category_5_Atlantic_hurricanes#Landfalls

Re:Quite a large range of safe...

[geoffball]

A lot of Virginia and North Carolina's power supplied by Dominion power comes from other cheap sources like nuclear and natural gas...Dominon's full list of power generataing stations: https://www.dom.com/about/stations/index.jsp The North Anna Nuclear Power Station is about 40-50 miles from Ashburn, VA home to data centers for Amazon, Google, Verizon, and AOL. All of these DCs have complicated sets of diesel generators (even if Amazon's took it's DC down during maintenance). I'd be most worried if the availability of diesel became scarce. When I worked at a big DC, a transfer switch broke that disconnected a room from the Dominion feed. Batteries took over and the generators came online seamlessly. The room ran exclusively on redundant generators for 90 days and each had to be serviced every 30 days days of use. No down time. Many of these even move exclusively to generator power on high demand days at the request of Dominion. Hurricanes that have struck the Northern Virginia area have generally degraded to tropical storm strength. Isabel, now almost 9 years ago was a 3 or 4 as it came ashore at the NC/VA border and was a TS and nearly a TD by the time the eye moved through DC Metro. Most of the power loss was residential in nature from downed trees (I lost mine for 6.5--worse than the recent derecho). There are few trees around them and they have underground feeds.

A few bits of information

[VoiceOfSanity]

First off, a Category 5 hurricane is highly unlikely striking that region of the country. Historically, there have been only three confirmed Category 5 landfalls, two of them in Florida and one in Mississippi (the 1935 Labor Day hurricane in Florida, Hurricane Camille in 1969 and Hurricane Andrew in 1992.) There has been Category 4 storms that have struck the Cape Hatteras area, and South Carolina did have Hurricane Hugo in 1989. But the odds of a Category 5 hitting that specific region of the US is extremely low.

Additionally, these data centers are not located along the coastline, but a significant distance inland. Facebook's is west of Charlotte, while Amazon's located west of Washington DC. Of the list, the Amazon one that could... and I mean could be impacted by a hurricane, but there really hasn't been a good strike in the Chesapeake Bay area in a while. They were taken down by the derechos that rolled through last month, and a derecho could happen pretty much anywhere west of the Rockies.

So while the chances of a hurricane taking down one of the datacenters is low, it could happen. It's one reason you don't see data centers built anywhere within 150 miles of the Gulf Coast or in Florida as a whole, the entire region is a target zone for Mother Nature. (Disclaimer: I've lived along the Gulf Coast now for over 30+ years and have been through a Category 5, two Category 4 and a host of other hurricanes over my time.)

Re:A few bits of information

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure it's been mentioned, but Terremark's Miami datacenter is about 3 blocks from the port (inland from Government Cut and the American Airlines Arena where the Heat play.) They show you DNS root servers when taking the tour. If I have to guess it's also where the major tubes from Latin America enter the country.

Re:A few bits of information

[mjr167]

I think Katrina demonstrated that a properly aimed cat 3 can do tons of damage. But, we might as well ask the question "Are we prepared for a tanker truck full of hydrogen to crash into Amazon's datacenter?"

Re:A few bits of information

[The Other White Meat]

There are at least three major commercial data centers located within one square mile of downtown Miami alone. More than a dozen in the greater South Florida area. Tampa, Jacksonville, Gainesville, Orlando, etc. all have plenty of data centers as well. I would imagine there are a few in the Titusville area, what with NASA and all...

No data centers in "Florida as a whole"?

They already have

[John Jorsett]

A few years back I belatedly discovered (the hard way) that my web hoster had located its servers in Hurricane Alley. My site was down for over a week as they trucked their server farm to a new location because the local utilities weren't going to be back until God knew when. I've since been paying attention to where things are located, physically, and anything that might be threatening to that area.

Biggest issue is support infrastructure

[gavving]

The biggest issue in a windstorm event is (tornado or hurricane), is likely going to be damage to the support infrastructure, and possibly generator fuel. For example the external heat exchangers mounted outside the building would likely be blown away or damaged, thus effecting the datacenter's ability to keep cool. Also if the datacenter has an external fuel tank or external generator those could be damaged and made inoperable.

In a very large hurricane scenario I'd think that fuel deliveries might be problematic in the first 24-72hrs after the event. Probably due to inability to safely get the fuel trucks into the facility due to downed lines/trees/bridges.

Replication is key

[Local ID10T]

I have my business data hosted primary in Somoma/Napa CA (wine country), a secondary in Monterrey CA (wine & beach), another on the big island of Hawaii (pacific island), and I am really thinking of adding a server in southern Louisiana -probably New Orleans. It is a bit rough having to take a long weekend and go check that the colo is maintaining infrastructure as per our agreement, but as long as I keep checking on one every couple months it is liveable...

Seriously though, keep your data in multiple locations, keep multiple backups, and don't worry too much about any one going offline -just as long as they don't all go offline at once.

Why category 5?

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

This seems a silly topic. We've recently seen what a bad thunderstorm can do. Of course a Cat 5 is a risk, don't ask stupid questions.

Re:Think on the children

[arkane1234]

God you sheeple!
Don't you realize that in order to get into politics you have to first be inaugurated into the grand Illuminati counsel!?
They're bred from a matrix of DNA sets that are systematically assembled at the proper times for the fore-mapped path of the world. Everything is written, it's just being followed!!!
You sheeple!!! You're all sheep being counted to the rhythm of the war drums!!!!!!!!@ zOMG!~@!#!@
rOn PaUl!@ REVOLUTION!@!@###@!~

depends on how its built

[AkumaKuruma]

If the data center is built with the correct architectural planning and resilience, then no it shouldn't affect it at all. these are the same centers that withstood the Earthquake and the horrendous storms recently. Granted that Amazon was a casualty of the storms, but there were so many other organizations that ran without a single hiccup. this is the reason yo want to load balance your service across geographically separate areas. its highly unlikely that a hurricane is nailing your east coast center the same time the Mississippi is flooding your mid west center and an earthquake takes out your west coast center. SOME users will be temporarily inconvenienced, but the service as a whole will be online.

the main things that relate to a data center staying operational:
1) will the building physically survive the incident. no brainer.
2) can power be maintained, including generator support. no brainer
3) can the telco connections stay active. no point in humming servers if a tree takes out your connection to the world.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/289607-data-centers-prove-earthquake-proof