Sep 23, 2008 : Ike Ups Disaster Readiness Interest

📅 September 23, 2008 - Hosting companies are now analyzing the impact of Hurricane Ike, which landed in Texas two weekends ago, inflicting an estimated $27 billion in damages in the US alone, and dousing the high-tech hotbed with wind and water.


Following an analysis of its operations during the hurricane, managed hosting, colocation and managed services provider CyrusOne (cyrusone.com) reports its Houston data center sustained no damage, power outages or equipment failures, maintaining 100 percent uptime of its mission-critical systems.

CyrusOne's facility is outside the FEMA, 500 year flood plain, avoiding the severe flooding conditions in the Houston area. During Hurricane Ike and many other storms including Hurricane Rita in 2005 and Tropical Storm Allison in 2001, the building and surrounding areas did not flood. Its reinforced, concrete walls weathered the onslaught of winds exceeding 80 mph gusts. The walls are rated to withstand 200 mph winds and the roof Category 5 hurricane winds.

Over 2.1 million houses and businesses were without power immediately following the storm. In preparation for the storm, it turned on its nine backup generators in anticipation. It had over 56,000 gallons of fuel on site with an additional 3 diesel tankers on the campus in the event of an extended loss of utility power.

Typically overlooked in data center contingency plans, access to water was a concern. Most of Houston lost water for three days, which would shut down data centers with chilled water plants. CyrusOne has a closed loop system with air chillers that serve as a backup to the water plant, allowing it to run without water.

"Preparing for these types of events is part of the day-to-day operations for CyrusOne," CyrusOne data center operations vice president Kenneth Wolverton said in a statement. "In addition to all critical staff on site to monitor and respond to every component of the mechanical and electrical infrastructure, we had contractors and technicians from manufacturers overseeing every component of the facility around the clock and continued to be on site for several days. Sleeping accommodations, food, water and other provisions are on site year around as a proactive measure."

The Planet (theplanet.com 👉 Total Reviews: 3
🙌 Average Rating: 1 / 10
👍 Good Reviews: 0
👎 Bad Reviews: 3
👈 Official Responses: 0 -> softlayer.com -> ibm.com) data center supervisor Eric Bush reported the status of its Houston data centers overnight as the storm descended on the city.

"Ticket load has been normal, all [data center] systems working flawlessly, and technicians doing upgrades/reboots/hardware changes," he wrote on the company's online forum. "We've been on utility power for a majority of the day...H1 is the data center which lost power and auto-switched to generation systems without a hitch. H2 shortly thereafter was manually pulled off the grid as a precautionary measure, also without any problems."

In preparation for the storm, The Planet brought in an additional 10,000 gallons of fuel as backup for its 10,000 Houston servers which could already remain powered for up to a week without any backup. It also moved some staff to its Dallas offices

Houston-based cPanel (cpanel.net) kept customers notified with updates on its website, writing that its Houston office was running in "emergency mode" and that staff would be limited as the storm passed. The company reported its phone systems would intermittently unavailable and customer response time would be longer than usual.

In response to disaster concerns, Houston-based iland (iland.com), a provider of VMware solutions, managed colocation, and high-speed IP Network and Data services, has added hosted VMware solutions to help make data centers hurricane-resistant and fully redundant.

According to they company's annoucement Tuesday, iland High Availability Hosted VMware Solutions allow customers to host multiple operating systems and applications in geographically dispersed data centers in the United States and Europe.

It has already deployed more than 250 virtual machines prior to its official launch including some which have experienced hurricanes.

"iland saved our business communications during and after hurricane Gustav," K-TEK (ktekcorp.com) network administrator Joseph Wiley, who oversees its facility in Prairieville, Louisiana. "They kept all our employees and divisions up and running worldwide, and our customers never knew we skipped a beat."

iland's fully redundant infrastructure is built in a VMware VI Enterprise environment on a VMware ESX platform, which offers redundancy at the hardware, network, and data center levels. Customers are offered a "stand by" option when preparing for disasters, where backup copies of virtual machines are made and sent to iland to be housed safely in its managed storage area network.