Slashdot Mirror
As Hurricane Season Looms, It's Disaster-Preparedness Time
Nerval's Lobster writes "In 2012, hurricane Sandy smacked the East Coast and did significant damage to New Jersey, New York City, and other areas. Flooding knocked many datacenters in Manhattan offline, temporarily taking down a whole lot of Websites in the process. Now that fall (and the tail end of hurricane season) is upon us again, any number of datacenters and IT companies are probably looking over their disaster-preparedness checklists in case another storm comes barreling through. Ryan Murphey, who heads up design and capacity planning for PEER 1 (which kept its Manhattan datacenter running during the storm by creating a makeshift bucket brigade to carry fuel to the building's 17th floor), offers a couple basic tips for possibly mitigating damage from the next infrastructure-crushing disaster, including setting up emergency response teams and arranging contracts for maintenance and fuel in advance."
Looming? Most North American hurricanes this year have already happened! Is this some kind of spam?
Hurricane season has been going on for a few months now. Why the hell would a data center or organization review their hurricane/storm related disaster checklists now instead of, oh, you know, before hurricane season? Any organization complacent and negligent enough to wait till the end of the hurricane season to review/correct their checklists probably isn't going to actually care about the checklist anyway.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
I was looking for a reason to lay in a supply of scotch. I already have the generator and transfer switch.
Arberg here we come!
Never modern have there been so few hurricanes by Oct 1 as there were in 2013. Meteorologist blame a "cooler" ocean. We still have another couple months to the season. nd bad ones have occurred late like Sandy.
We have our servers in a data centers in inland Oregon/Washington. There has never been a hurricane or typhoon within a thousand miles, seismic events are rare, the area is used to large amounts of rain so flooding has minimal effect, the weather is temperate so there is rarely extremes in heat or cold and Tsunamis would have to get past the coast range mountains to be an issue. Basically, nothing ever happens there. I would recommend anyone with important data at least have a DR location in a low risk geographical area.
Look, we don't have to re-invent the wheel. A hurricane preparedness kit is EXACTLY the same as Zombie Survival Kit minus the shotguns.
>> which kept its Manhattan datacenter running during the storm by creating a makeshift bucket brigade to carry fuel to the building's 17th floor
No fire code violations there, right? I'd love to be an attorney near this one. "So, you burned down the building trying to keep a couple of servers running, when you could have just co-located your equipment in a smarter place (like anyone who knows what they're doing would have done)."
When you're doing things like HFT, colocation in a different geographical area is a non-option. They're eking out every microsecond they can, even going so far as to use microwave for communications when possible instead of fiber simply for the reduced latency. Putting the servers way the hell out somewhere away from Wall Street is not helpful.
Surely you don't think that these companies have large datacenter operations in Manhattan just for the cheap real estate?
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
While rural New Mexico might be extreme, there's a reason that places like Phoenix AZ are filled with new data centers and skilled IT staff. Need a disaster recovery site? Put it here, or in Nevada. Flood? Hurricane? Earthquake? Tornados? You must be kidding.
Sure, it's not the tech density of San Jose, but it's kitten-safe from a disaster standpoint.
We as a society are doomed if we get hit with a disaster worse than Sandy.
Sandy was a tropical storm. Not a hurricane. No, there wasn't anything "super" about it.
Require all new housing within 10 miles of a coast to be built either on stilts or with a ground floor only used for garage, mud room, and guest room.
That makes sense. I live 1 mile from the coast. Of course I also live 200 feet above sea level. What sort of storm surge should I worry about?
Remove all insurance subsidies for housing withing 10 miles of a coast. All of them. No exemptions.
But keep them for places subject to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, forest fires, river flooding and flash floods?
Raise power systems 10 feet up, to allow for storm surge flooding.
You do realize that most of the power losses from Sandy were due to the winds breaking above ground power lines, right?
Redraft flood drainage and screening to anticipate storm surges 10 feet in elevation in all locations.
That sounds useful - Sandy had a 13 foot storm surge.