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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.
Permanently erased? How can this be? Doesn't Google keep an off-site backup of my pr0n on tape or DVDs or sumpthin? So much for best practices, I guess.
Just use Amazon like everyone else. Google cannot be trusted, and I have said that many times. They 1) frequently decide to shut down services users rely on. One of the persistence mechanisms we depended on recently got the head shot, costing us so much money that we decided to move to Amazon, which has a standardized stack, and 2) data loss, and 3) non-existant customer service. Try contacting Google with a pressing issue.... you'll eventually give up.
Lightning struck the same place not twice, but four times?
... Alphabet's new "personal re-vivification" project is making good progress. The project leader, V.Frankenstein was unavailable for comment however.
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.
n/t
who where what when now?
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.
That comes to 4.84 Jiggawatts! No wonder there was outage.
Thats no excuse. It should be distributed amongst seperate machines in seperate centres instantaniously.
Thats no excuse. It should be distributed amongst seperate machines in seperate centres instantaniously.
So faster than the speed of light using the infinitely-wide infinite improbability data bus?
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
hours to replicate data? why so long? are they still running __________? (insert your most hated system/language)
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Come on people. This has the potential to be legend... ary. What a complete failure.
Even just form a quick punt we could glimpse such lyrical word play as:
"Lightning strike inside Cloud"
"Cloud damaged by lightning"
"Cloud not lightning-proof"
Please read the fucking Register until you gets it.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
I know that's what I base my critical data storage choices on - how fast a tangentially-related service's static front page loaded 15 years ago on dialup.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Bullshit. I used to design high voltage connections, and tested using a 300kV impulse generator. I've seen a lot of crazy stuff analyzing field failures. You can greatly reduce the risk, but you cannot remove all risk in an above ground facility, as a practical matter.
I do see lots of silly stuff done, based on myth and lack of knowledge.
Place nail here >+
*GUFFAW*
You're wasted here, you should do stand up.
Thats no excuse. It should be distributed amongst seperate machines in seperate centres instantaniously.
You can have that services if you want to pay for it. You get that, right?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
If I understand this correctly, to get your personal data removed from Google search engines it requires 4 lightning strikes to the exact same location?
Must have missed that part in the EULA...
you left out about 99-44/100 percent of the technology and art of lightning protection.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?