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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?"
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.
Ezekiel 23:20
A Cat 5 impacts the East Coast and we are worried that Facebook or Amazon might be down?
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
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.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.)
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.
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.