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Comment by barkingcat | Hacker News Reader

An outage requiring generator power for longer than 1 week might not allow transportation of fuel. Just want to bring that up in case people really did think you can run "indefinitely" on generator power if the roads, bridges, and gas supply network is out, or if there's an emergency state of war or terrorism.

At the 1wk+ territory, it will start to look something like Katrina, where the roads were all blocked by flooding waters and fuel resupply missions required the protection of the National Guard.

I mean you can charter helicopters to bring in fuel, but I think there are more urgent things to power than a datacentre in those cases, for example, hospitals and shelters for emergency humanitarian aid.

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> At the 1wk+ territory, it will start to look something like Katrina ...

This reminds me of a blog that was live-updated during Katrina by a data center operator: [1]. They managed to keep everything running through the whole storm, IIRC, but it was pretty dicey -- moving barrels of diesel by hand, staying on-site and surviving with water rationing, losing all but one upstream fiber, etc. Fascinating reading in hindsight.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interdictor_(blog)

Where I used to work we had refuelling agreements with multiple vendors. Yes, hospitals and critical infrastructure are prioritized first, but we ran on generators for an extended spell during the Northeast Blackout of 2003[1] (the outage affecting our facility only lasted a couple of days, but due to the utilities' appeal to reduce load on the grid until it was fully functional we decided to run on generators for over a week).

Edit: One of my fond memories of that time was actually greeting the refuelling truck and directing it to the point where he could plug a hose into a pipe on our building and start pumping.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

If terrorism, what stops someone from renting cabinets, bringing in "servers" loaded with explosives, and blowing the place up? Or even a molotov thrown at some of those big fibre entrances. Sorting that out, I'd imagine, would take a while.

Never underestimate what people would do to keep the stock market running...

These days, I'd hope they can failover to standby hosts in "IL#" or "VA#" or another datacenter in a nearby region.

The DR/BC space has become pretty robust, and with the right vendor, a datacenter loss can be recovered from simply by powering on fully-replicated VMs in another datacenter.

Or do! They closed the markets in the US for two days during Sandy even though NY4 (and the other US equity exchange data centers) were fine.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240529702047893045780871...

Sometimes it feels like the opposite. Any day that has the slightest hint of holiday to it is "markets closed! remember no work tomorrow! hooray for national silly lala day!"

This was an issue after katrina

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