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1970-01-01

There are several DCs in the Tampa area. How are they? https://www.datacentermap.com/usa/florida/tampa/

I used to be a customer of Hivelocity with dedicated servers in their Tampa facilities. Top notch operation, never had an issue. Supposedly they remained unscathed through Milton: https://www.hivelocity.net/blog/hurricane-milton-service-not...

I really wanted to reply here with a link to something I recall reading from back when Katrina happened, but I can't find it.

If I remember correctly it was someone called Usurper or The Usurper and they chronicled their journey at the time looking after a DC during Katrina. It may not have been a whole DC, possibly it was a business and their (smaller set of) servers, but my memory fails me.

Unfortunately I can't remember what medium it was written on - a blog of some sort? Heck, it could even have been on the Something Awful forums given the year.

I remember stories of struggling to find fresh sources of gas for the generator and all the fun involved in getting it from A to B.

Anyone else remember that? I'd love to have another read of it now, and I think some of you might too. It'll offer a bit of insight of what's to come this year too.

Yes, that was the interdictor blog!

https://interdictor.livejournal.com/2005/08/27/

Interdictor! That's the one!

Looks like the posts start at https://interdictor.livejournal.com/?skip=340 and newer ones can be found via the 'Next 10' link at the lower right.

Thanks Julian!

There's also the infamous bucket brigade from Hurricane Sandy. There was a Stack Overflow podcast about it but it looks like it disappears, here's a read though:

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/reliving-sand...

Aren't datacenters usually pretty hardened buildings? I would think they're okay but disconnected.

need to get the electricity from somewhere. Need to feed the people who work there.

Honestly not really. Some of the older facilities took great care on site selection and some hardened building features, but modern sites are more based on power grid availability and are simply standard amazon distribution warehouse style buildings.

The redundancy is in having your data and infrastructure in multiple buildings and geographic locations.

This is due to a myriad of reasons but they all boil down to cost and practicality. The scale of modern facilities typically eclipses anything built 20 years ago by a huge margin which further limits site selection.

The days of AT&T long lines are long gone. Simply driving a standard SUV through the right wall or two in most facilities would be enough to cripple them for a long while, much less flooding or a direct hit by hurricane force winds.

Of course there are exceptions.

> redundancy is in having your data and infrastructure in multiple buildings

aka "RAIDC" -- redundant array of inexpensive data centers. :)

Wow. I didn't expect to see so many so close to the water. They might be in high-rises though.

You could be in the basement of a high-rise though, so that's not quite as helpful. My dad was in commercial construction, and I got to visit several sites. One in particular had a basement with concrete islands dotting the floor. They were support for the computer racks to be raised so if the sprinklers were to open the racks would be above the flooding water. They however would not protect from 12'-15' storm surges

Getting all the equipment 24 inches off the floor saves you from a pretty big fraction of events. You can often mostly protect against fairly severe events with sump pumps and flood barriers, but some water almost always gets in. If nothing important is on the ground you'll often still be OK.

For a datacenter that does not exist on a coastline susceptible to hurricanes, you might have a point. However, we're specifically discussing a cluster of datacenters near Tampa which just missed a direct hit from a very powerful hurricane that had a forecast of a storm surge of 12'-15'. The thing to remember about storm surge is the predicted height does not include the height of wind driven waves on top of that surge. So unless your data center racks are on the 3rd floor, you are screwed

Yes, I am not saying that you can withstand any event.

I have seen >3' of water next to a building with infrastructure in the ground level that were fine, though. Seepage barriers and sump pumps and elevating things a little bit can do more than you'd think.

It's also worth noting that however high the storm surge is -- your infrastructure is probably at least a little above sea level.

Anything of value should be above the first floor.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/healt...

They raise the floor not just to keep the racks above any water but also the air handlers typically blow chilled air under the floor to be delivered via perforated floor tiles to the "cold aisles" this saves having to run ductwork for cooling. Also they can run power, networking, and chilled water for any systems needing it, under the floor.

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