Think cloud computing saved you from Sandy? Think again.

Think cloud computing saved you from Sandy? Think again. ~ I, Cringely
11-1-12

Late at night last weekend, as Hurricane Sandy was beating the crap out of the eastern seaboard, I received an e-mail message from lower Manhattan. You may have received this message, too, or one just like it. It felt to me like getting a radiogram from the sinking Titanic. An Internet company was running out of diesel fuel for its generator and would shortly be dropping off the net. The identity of the company doesn’t matter. What matters is what we can learn from their experience.
The company had weathered power outages before and had four days of diesel fuel stored onsite. They had felt ready for Sandy. But most of their fuel wasn’t at the generator, it was stored in tanks in the building basement — a basement that was soon flooded, the transfer pumps destroyed by incoming seawater. It was like a miniature Fukushima Daiichi, not far from Wall Street.
The company felt prepared but wasn’t. There was no way to get fuel from the basement to the generator so they were staying online as long as possible then shutting down.
There are obvious lessons here like don’t put the pumps below ground level. Good pumps could draw well enough to be placed above the maximum historical flood stage. But that’s not all that’s wrong with this scenario. Why was the company dependent on a single data center?
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