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."
WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re-Inventing The Wheel (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:How many emergencies in the past 12 years? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Hurricane season is just about over. (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of florida is not at risk. The problem is that the insurance rates for the truly risky locations don't reflect the genuine cost of living there, so the wealthy people who can afford coastal property are effectively being subsidized - either they get insurance at too-low of a rate to match the risk, or they forego it and lean on the federal and state disaster relief programs.
Anyone deliberately living in the Category 1 flood zone should not get state or federal money when their houses are wrecked, regardless of whether they have been built sturdily or not. Cat 1 storms happen all over florida almost every year.
The price of insurance should be allowed to rise and fall to reflect the actual risk and cost of each location, sending pricing signals to people who would build in risky areas. Otherwise, you don't really have insurance. You have a subsidy of people living in risky areas paid for by people who choose more sensible locations. The price of insurance in the sensible locations should basically be so cheap that no one would bother not getting it....