New York Data Centers Battle Floods, Utility Outages

miller60 writes "At least three data center buildings in lower Manhattan are struggling with power problems amid widespread flooding and utility outages caused by Hurricane Sandy. Flooded basements at two sites took out diesel fuel pumps, leaving them unable to refuel generators on higher levels. One of these was Datagram, which knocked out Buzzfeed and the Gawker network of sites. At 111 8th Avenue, some tenants lost power when Equinix briefly experienced generator problems." The NY Times has a running list of Sandy-related problems, including 5,700 more flight cancellations, 6 million people without power, rising water levels at a nuclear plant, official disaster declarations from President Obama, and a death toll of 38. On the upside, and despite the high water levels, the Nuclear Energy Institute was quick to point out that all 34 nuclear facilities in Sandy's path made it through without problems.

Comments

Look at the bright side

[AuMatar]

If we're really lucky, it'll take out all the high frequency traders systems for a few days and we can have an actual market without parasites.

Nah, who am I kidding. If that actually happened they'd keep Wall Street closed.

Re:Look at the bright side

[tlhIngan]

HFT systems are located as close to the exchange's servers as they physically can be, because all the marketeers think it's bad juju to have a ping time above .01ms.

Needless to say, if the HFT systems go down, then the market's exchange servers 2 feet away will probably be down, as well.

If you're within the datacenter, there's a chance the trading computers are a bit further away from that actually. What happens is that the exchange actually ends up finding the longest cable they need to reach from the trading computer to the farthest rack, then they ensure that every cable from the trading computer any rack is that length. That way all the HFT traders who pay to be physically close in the data center aren't getting any advantage - there's just a huge coil of cable above the rack to ensure every rack gets the same latency. One could argue the coil of cable adds to latency by being an inductor, I suppose...

Where are the mid-American datacenters

[blueforce]

Why aren't there more datacenters in Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, etc.? Surely the threat from Tornados could be mitigated and the electrical infrastructure built out more cheaply than the losses due to coastal disasters, no?