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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.
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.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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?
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
I was promised a NUKULAR OPOCALIPSE yesterday, and here we are with satellite images that don't even show the entire East Coast as a glowing radioactive wasteland.
I think that this complete lack of NUKULAR meltdown is 100% absolute irrefutable proof of two key concepts:
1. Capitalism is an abject failure and we need U.N. control of everything and everyone right now.
2. NUKULAR power is obviously far too dangerous and should be banned right now before somebody doesn't get killed again JUST LIKE FUKUSHIMA.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
How about not putting mission critical equipment susceptible to water damage in the one place all water will go.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
This is as strong as a case forever to stop paying attention to the media.
Sounds like you already stopped paying attention. Had you even checked the one link in the article, or even read the summary, you'd know it was a catastophy, and New York will not function "perfectly tomorrow like nothing ever happened."
Schools closed. Subways closed 4-5 days. 38 people dead. Market closed. Fire in Queens destroys dozens of homes. Power outages for millions. 7% of the US population in fact without power. Tunnels flooded (subway and car). NYU Tisch hospital evacuated due to flood related generator failures, including premature babies on ventilators. Just a small summary, of just one city.
I'm a former NYer. Have spoken to many friends and family. None expect normal life tomorrow. Some have considerable property damage. None lost a life, thankfully. I live in South Florida, incidentally, and rather well understand how damaging hurricanes can be. Wilma damaged my car, and cancelled my wedding day as the roof caved in on the place we were getting married in that Friday.
This is a rare strong case to NOT stop paying attention to the media.
They were idiots for going out to sea. Even if it was marginally safer for the boat to be at sea than in port for the storm, it was safer for the crew to be in port, or in hotel rooms 100 miles inland. Those people died due to a combination of greedy ownership that valued the ship more than the crew's safety and their own stupidity in not refusing. All this for a reproduction used in movie shoots. A senseless waste.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I don't think you're doing that right.
"What were they thinking building a city between two bodies of water near the ocean so close to sea level"?
"Maybe we should just move the city to further inland, where its safer and we won't have to go through this over and over again...and keep wasting money"
I know I've heard that before..hmmmm.
Seems like the should have known not to build so close to the water, and if they did...not to put things that react badly with salt water underground, eh?
Sorry if it sounds like sour grapes...and I do feel horrible for the people that flooded and lost things, I know first hand how that feels from Katrina.
But I do get a bit uneasy..seeing how differently things are treated during the storms and afterwards....depending on where in the US you are situated.
I mean, this storm, while large in breadth....was a weak Cat. 1 when it made landfall. I could see it being worse, if it had happened and turned into a blizzard over NJ and NYC as was a worst case scenario.
But c'mon...if you have property ON the freakin shoreline, beach front houses, guess what...you're gonna get damaged with a hurricane or other strong storm.
Aside from the areas right near the water..I didn't see all that much damage. Sure, people are going to be without power a couple or more weeks in some areas. Those of us that live in the Gulf south take this as normal a couple times a year...that's what you get for living close to the ocean.
Again....not to make light of anyone's loss, flooding is very difficult to deal with...it sucks.
But this was a weak storm, and did about normal damage as happens to places with a storm like this hitting a coastal area.
I feel bad for those that will next have to deal with FEMA.....then again, maybe their a bit better by now...but I still have less than fond memories for them.
Anyway...people in those areas up there....you'd better get used to these storms hitting more often.
These things go in cycles..and ya'll have been lucky the past decades. I believe back in the 50's a number of storms made landfall up there...but has been so long, that people forget.
Last year, Irene and this year Sandy....hope you're better prepared for next year....if nothing else, you're a dolt if you don't purchase flood insurance. It is DIRT cheap....most everyone would be well served buying it if you ever have even occasional flash floods in your area....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Callcentric apparently had a single datacenter in NYC with no backup power generator. Lots of discussion here.
No 'might' about it.
Death rate of NYC is around 1,000/week. or 140 per day.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Everyone depending on mass transportation...a little flooding and the city comes to a stand still?
Hell, we get hit with Cat 1 level storms all the time in the Gulf south area...it is a major PITA, and I do feel for people that got flooded, it is horrible...but it *IS* part of living near the coast of an ocean.
I hope everyone had flood insurance, it is dirt cheap.
But really aside from the expected shoreline damage..this wasn't that bad of a storm. It appeared the media had to try to go out of their way to try to make areas where they were reporting look worse than it was. I mean, reporters not on the coast...barely had wind blowing, a little rain in the background....it wasn't THAT bad of a storm.
But it does show the drawback of everyone proclaiming the good points of living urban...at least in less urban places, the storm doesn't put everything at a stand still...everyone in more 'normal' cities and areas, can still get in their own car or truck and move and go as needed to repair things, resupply and yes...get back to work and normal life.
Seems the urban style, and 99% dependence on mass, underground transportation is proving to be a nagging single point of failure, no?
This was not that bad of a storm. If it hit NYC and other cities there worse than it should...maybe it should be a wake up call for them...to be better prepared. These storms come in cycles and this is likely going to be more of a routine occurrence in the next decade or so.
it isn't like anyone will call for us to "move NYC to a safer area" like we've heard when talk of rebuilding flooded and hurricane damaged cities happened in the not so distant past...even on Slashdot.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
that flooding ruins backup generators, pumps, fuel storage. I hope that disaster mitigation plans are reviewed.
I also hate people who judge negatively from hindsight, but disaster planning is about considering the most probable of the improbable. Flooding looms most threatening and probable of the improbable.
Perhaps putting all the backup infrastructure on a higher floor makes it harder to maintain, access, and/ or protect from mischief/ terrorism. However plain old flooding seems to be an issue time and time again in disaster scenarios and really needs highest priority in disaster plans.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Huh. Works for me.
"Be better prepared" - than what? The storm surge that flooded lower Manhattan beat the previous record by 2 feet, and that record was set almost 200 years ago. The fact that there were only 38 people killed in the entire region shows just how well prepared they were. Nobody was drowned in the subways, because they stopped the subways before they got flooded. Nobody was stuck in elevators, because they turned off the elevators before the power was shut down.
What is it with all these people saying 'it was not that bad a storm'. It was that bad a storm for the area. It was record flooding. From what I understand, Category 5 hurricanes are 'not that bad a storm' compared to the storms on Jupiter - pretty meaningless comparison, isn't it?
Yes, because a single fiber cable in some backwater town with zero redundancy
Why do you think there is zero redundancy?
Even if you had only one carrier in a town that had a fiber run go through (very unlikely), if the cable gets cut on one side of town the fiber provider can just run all the traffic around the nationwide loop the other way until it gets where it needs to go - and believe me a cut will be fixed VERY quickly.
A town where "a single fiber" dead ends is obviously not a good location, but there are many towns across the U.S. with bundles of fiber going through.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Weird, it works just fine for me.
Reminds me of one of xkcd's funniest comics:
http://xkcd.com/404/
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
If the media didn't portray this as the " END OF TEH WORLD ! " then I may pay more attention to it.
The bottom line is, while tragic, the damage is pretty much what is expected from a Category One Storm. Could have been a lot worse. There are four more categories of stronger storms to contend with . . .
Lots of rain, storm surge, high winds for a while, fire, flooding, no power for several days to months ( YES months. Some places here after IKE had no power for MONTHS ), the usual. At least it didn't spawn a dozen tornadoes over the city for you. Nothing like dealing with a hurricane AND the friggin tornadoes they usually spawn on top of it all. ( Hurricane Alicia - 1983 I think it was )
Lots of lessons are going to be learned. ( Like not putting emergency generators and / or their fuel tanks in the basements. Realizing your home insurance doesn't include Flood insurance. Etc. )
The only folks that are shocked at the damage are those that have never been through this. They may have seen it on TV in past years when Florida, Texas or Louisiana got hammered by similar storms and didn't think that much of it. Now, at least, this regions generation has a healthy respect for what a hurricane is capable of. If another one comes along, they'll be much better prepared to deal with it.
The Navy did the same with ships from Norfolk. It is far safer to be out at sea than tied up dockside.
Unless you misjudge the size, speed and track of the storm. Now add in a generator that craps out, and cannot pump out the bilge anymore.
When they left port, the projected storm track was much different than what actually happened.
The navy has much bigger, more modern ships. There's also national security risks if the navy boats are damaged. No such problems for a movie prop.
And like I said- it may be safer for the boat. It isn't safer for the crew. This wasn't a surprise storm, this had been forecast for a week. Tie up the boat, stay in a hotel (preferably about 100 miles or so inland), and then repair the boat as needed. The health and safety of the crew is far more important than the ship. The owners deserve to be sued into oblivion for even asking. It is NOT acceptable to risk 16 lives to save money on repairs. Hell, take it to a dry dock if you're that scared.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
1 dead, 1 missing, and 13 came damn close and needed rescue choppers during a hurricane, endangering both themselves and the people who had to save them. Its inexcusable and criminally negligent. It probably doesn't deserve quite the amount of media attention its getting, but it was amazingly stupid.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
It took off a 1000sq ft section of roof in our Seacaucus Data Center and let the rain in -and the magic smoke out....
will be several days to recover, but we have other Data Centers in Mass, NY and Atlanta and Denver which can still cover that half of the country....
-I'm just sayin'
All Linux VPS located in New York City, NY VPS are currently offline. They are located in Internap's LGA6 facility in 111 8th Avenue.
Please be advised that Internap's LGA11 facility is experiencing significant flooding in the sub-basement of the 75 Broad Street building as a result of Hurricane Sandy. The flooding has submerged and destroyed the site's diesel pumps and is preventing fuel from being pumped to the generators on the mezzanine level.
Thankfully, our NYC server nodes are not directly located in LGA11's facility, but rather LGA6. The cause of this temporary outage is that LGA6 routes certain parts of the network's backbones through LGA11 which is currently offline as explained above. URPad's downtown NYC facility, located at 111 8th Avenue, is currently experiencing a network-only outage. The datacenter is not located in the storm surge zone, and is not suffering from any flooding. All URPad hardware and assets are safe and remain powered on. Engineers are aware of the network outage and all efforts will be made to restore network connectivity as soon as possible.
Internap & URPad will continue to work hard to assess the situation and our recovery plans, and will communicate those plans as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience and understanding during this crisis. Please trust that we are doing everything we can to bring your services back online as soon as possible.
before we can tell all those people along the jersey and CT shores, ya wanna live on the ocean, get your own darn flood insurance, we the taxpayers are tired of picking up the tab so you can have a great view ?