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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.
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?
The affected service was Google Computer Engine, meaning that data may be changing. Replication isn't instantaneous, so I'd imagine the lost data was pending modifications.
... 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.
From what I read elsewhere it was new/current data, not even an hour old, and the lightening may have caused things to run off batteries for a bit too long due to the multiple strikes. Seems not unreasonable as an explanation, might be entirely wrong though. Articles implied that users can also backup on their own sites to ensure that they are not behoved to anyone.
n/t
who where what when now?
Darkening reduces the output of solar panels, so you can't win either way.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
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 >+