NYC Data Centers Hit By Hurricane Sandy

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Power outages caused by Hurricane Sandy are causing problems for data centers in the affected area.

The local power company, Consolidated Edison shut down power to portions of lower Manhattan this evening in an effort to prevent damage to underground equipment. That coincided with when Gawker.com and Gizmodo.com went offline. In a Twitter update at 4:21 p.m. PT, Gizmodo said: "We'll be back soon! There was a data center battery failure after the power went down in Lower Manhattan. Generators powering up." Buzzfeed.com is also down, saying: "Our site is down. Problems with NY-area servers due to Sandy." Livestream.com says it's experiencing "a major outage."
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battary failure, do this places not do regular tests on their backup power systems :D
 
Batteries are only for people who don't think ahead and include a bunch of little kids pedaling bicycles hooked to generators for their data centers. :( Doesn't anyone think about green alternatives to batteries these days?
 
SkribbelKat said:
Batteries are only for people who don't think ahead and include a bunch of little kids pedaling bicycles hooked to generators for their data centers. :( Doesn't anyone think about green alternatives to batteries these days?
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Child Labor Laws :p ... cats on treadmills work much better as green alternatives :D
 
kbrickley said:
Child Labor Laws :p ... cats on treadmills work much better as green alternatives :D
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Cats are very inefficient. They sleep way too much to be good treadmill creatures. Maybe puppies because they're always excited?
 
I would have gone with Ginny pigs myself. throw about 4 in same cage with one wheel, they'll fight over it and over time figure out scheduled themselves.

anyway i'm not sure how big of battery once might have, i mean i would have though of couple of hours. and after some time even that runs out due to no POWER to recharge them. running those server must require lot of power.
 
Cbshahji said:
I would have gone with Ginny pigs myself. throw about 4 in same cage with one wheel, they'll fight over it and over time figure out scheduled themselves.

anyway i'm not sure how big of battery once might have, i mean i would have though of couple of hours. and after some time even that runs out due to no POWER to recharge them. running those server must require lot of power.
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You shouldn't speak that way about Ginny ... she can't help how she looks :p ... perhaps the Hamster powered backup would work or maybe a rat powered one ... we could either use all the New York sewer rats or the Washington politicians ... they should both work well if properly motivated with a cattle prod or something :D
 
Noticed YouTube acting very unstable this morning, as well. Wonder how many servers they have on the East coast.
 
MrGuvernment said:
battary failure, do this places not do regular tests on their backup power systems :D
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The place had diesel generators but the fuel pumps are offline. I do not know if they just failed or are submerged. A lot of places have a plan for a flood, but not a complete equipment submerge.
 
Hardly a surprise these data centers are going down...I suspect even some of the best prepared companies would have difficulty keeping data centers up in the midst of such a storm. The real question is why don't they have failover locations?
 
Sandy's a whore. She knocked out most internet traffic going in and out of the city. I just contacted my data center tech people in New Jersey asking what's going on with our email services (that data center is in NYC) and they said they're built to withstand storms, and they're doing fine, but the problem is traffic going in and out of the city was severed. Stupid Sandy.

My data center provider is Apps4Rent.
 
crazypooljunkie said:
Hardly a surprise these data centers are going down...I suspect even some of the best prepared companies would have difficulty keeping data centers up in the midst of such a storm. The real question is why don't they have failover locations?
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Money. They could spend millions on redundancy for a very rare caliber event that will seldom if ever occur...or they could go offline for a few days.
 
This is where a lot of websites and businesses will find out that what they thought was decentralized systems is not in fact decentralized.

A large medical provider in my area spent millions to decentralize their communications systems (phones, telecoms, internet, etc) to avoid losing all communications if one place went down. Not a year after the decentralization was complete, a fire in a box somewhere brought down all communications, everywhere, in the several states it operates in. Hospitals with no internal phone service were reduced to organizing human runners between departments for most of a day.

Truly decentralized networking is very, very difficult to implement. Nature has a funny way of attacking the ONE THING that will bring down the whole network. But we already knew this. It's called Murphy's Law.
 
I saw that a NYC hospital couldnt get it generators fired up

makes me wonder if they tested them last week..........or this weekend.....or earlier in the day to make sure they were preparted
 
haunter said:
I saw that a NYC hospital couldnt get it generators fired up

makes me wonder if they tested them last week..........or this weekend.....or earlier in the day to make sure they were preparted
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I believe some of the places had the generators in the basements, which obviously flooded and made having the generators moot. Great if it wasn't a flood, though.
 
PersonalJ said:
I have had bad luck with generators at datacenters. I read on webhostingtalk that one of the major datacenter building's basement flooded which is where the fuel storage and fuel pumps were located.http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1205042
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OTOH, where else architecturally can you put the diesel backup gear that will be safe for facility workers/occupants for the other 99% of the time when the building isn't flooding?...that isn't more of a fire hazard or failure hazard?
 
Skripka said:
OTOH, where else architecturally can you put the diesel backup gear that will be safe for facility workers/occupants for the other 99% of the time when the building isn't flooding?...that isn't more of a fire hazard or failure hazard?
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Maybe pumps could be setup to pump water out of the basement if it begins to flood?
 
A storm surge flood can fill your basement levels in minutes, if not seconds. There were places in this storm that got 7 feet of water in 4 minutes. You know how they say it would be like trying to pump the ocean? That's literally the case here.

Japan had its wakeup call last year that it should reconsider its typical placement of backup generators near a shoreline that is vulnerable to tsunami. America just got its wakeup call about backup generator placement near coastal areas that are vulnerable to storm surge.
 
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