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Lightning Wipes Storage Disks At Google Data Center
An anonymous reader writes: Lightning struck a Google data center in Belgium four times in rapid succession last week, permanently erasing a small amount of users' data from the cloud. The affected disks were part of Google Computer Engine (GCE), a utility that lets people run virtual computers in the cloud on Google's servers. Despite the uncontrollable nature of the incident, Google has accepted full responsibility for the blackout and promises to upgrade its data center storage hardware, increasing its resilience against power outages.
Contrary to popular belief, it's common that ligthning strikes several times at the same place. Something that was attracting lightning, if not destructed by the first strike, will still be a major target standing for the next ones.
The announcement is about Google Cloud Engine. Not about Google's own services (gmail, search, photos, docs, that sort of things). AFAIK, none of Google's own service announced any loss - presumably because they don't rely on a single location.
From the post:
> In particular, it was possible at all times to recreate new Persistent Disks from existing snapshots.
i.e. snapshots were fine.
> This outage is wholly Google's responsibility. However, we would like to take this opportunity to highlight an important reminder for our customers: GCE instances and Persistent Disks within a zone exist in a single Google datacenter and are therefore unavoidably vulnerable to datacenter-scale disasters. Customers who need maximum availability should be prepared to switch their operations to another GCE zone. For maximum durability we recommend GCE snapshots and Google Cloud Storage as resilient, geographically replicated repositories for your data.
So, if some poor users of GCE thought a single geographical location can withstand disasters, they now know.
If you RTFA you'll see they mention it only affected "recently written data" that had not yet made it to persistent storage. So probably only a few hours old at most.
In this case it was disks the customer had specifically requested to be un replicated for performance. So all the data could be gone in a flood and Google would still be within its obligations.
*GUFFAW*
You're wasted here, you should do stand up.