Does anyone know if there's a real-time feed of Earthquakes somewhere? The USGS website doesn't post the Earthquakes until 10-15 minutes after it's over - which nullifies any type of automated warning for our data centers.
https://typhoon.yahoo.co.jp/weather/jp/earthquake/kyoshin/
I felt a moderate earthquake here in Yokohama a few days ago. I had my phone with me, so I clicked my bookmark for that page and, before the shaking stopped, could see that it was a magnitude 6 with epicenter offshore from Fukushima--nothing to worry about. A minute or so later the permanent record of the quake was online:
https://typhoon.yahoo.co.jp/weather/jp/earthquake/2024040412...
Magnetic hard drives are sensitive to vibration. You can shout at hard drives and measure the effects (video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4).
One of the worst-case scenarios is a head crash. A head crash will damage the media and may result in data loss. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_crash
My guess is that earthquakes powerful enough to cause a head crash are powerful enough for widespread destruction anyway, but I’m no expert. I did some quick searches for hard drives damaged by earthquake, and the only results I got were scenarios where the hard drives or the whole rack got knocked over by the earthquake and hit the floor.
- Personnel-level warning to immediately rerack servers, close racks, and get off ladders and away from fall hazards
- Proactively spin up generators to reduce failover in the more-likely event of a power disruption
- Potentially temporarily shut off very large circulation fans so that blades don't collide with the housings
- Potentially stop and carefully restart cooling water loops, in case there's a rupture in the system somewhere
Add to this: initiate failover or zone transfer of distributed servers / services to other DCs outside the likely impacted area.