As Hurricane Season Looms, It's Disaster-Preparedness Time 117
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."
Hurricane season is just about over. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:a bucket brigade of FUEL?! (Score:5, Informative)
>> 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?
Sandy Wasn't a Hurricane (Score:5, Informative)
Sandy was a tropical storm. Not a hurricane. No, there wasn't anything "super" about it.
Re:Hurricane season is just about over. (Score:5, Informative)
I think you are ignoring some critical points.
Like the population affected by gulf and southern atlantic hurricanes.
You know... texas with 25 million (up by 5 million since 2000 alone) vs new york with 19 million ( essentially no growth since 2000).
Another 16 million in Florida (which has been hit by almost every major hurricane at some point). 10's of millions more in loiusiana, alabama, mississippi, the carolina's, and arkansas.
You have an argument culturally (tho california has come on a bit with it's 33 million people). Nothing is replacing Broadway and off Broadway.
New York is visible financially (tho it's slowly being routed around due to cost issues). The largest component of job loss recently has been financial jobs (20,000 in 2009 alone).
The hurricane season officially began on June 1 and will end on November 30.
It was predicted to be a rough season.
So far, it's a dud.
In the 20th century, of the 64 major hurricanes to hit the US, 51 hit in september and august.