Hurricanes Remind Us of the Difficulty Preventing Outages

Some data centers can withstand a direct missile strike. But most are not so resilient.

In fact, 50% of companies have had servers go down due to a natural disaster between 2005 and 2015. the frequency of such events? Almost once every other year!

Â This is a major issue for companies and one that amounts to lost revenue and reputation. But why aren’t all data centers able to withstand natural disasters, and what can you do to keep your servers online?

Harvey and Irma are Perfect Examples of Natural Disasters Which May Disrupt Services

The last major hurricane, Sandy, took out major data centers in New York. Now, with a wetter, warmer climate in store for the future, storms are going to become a regular occurrence. We got the first taste of that this year with Hurricane Harvey.

Harvey dropped unprecedented levels of rain on Texas. This caused many data centers to fear and prepare for the worst: flooding. Flooding is one of the biggest potential threats to data centers. The ability to take down generators, damage servers, and more makes it a difficult problem for data centers.

Most data centers in Houston were lucky enough to emerge from Harvey unscathed, but that doesn’t mean the storm was not a threat! Many data centers prepared for the worst with stockpiles of food, water, cots, and more. Some even utilized washing machines and showers for staff and customers to stay on site for extended periods.

These preparations helped but wouldn’t have mattered if flood waters caused major damage. Most data centers were positioned in areas not as affected by flooding. This is why many were able to stay online, even in the face of the disaster.

But only days later, another very powerful storm is headed towards America’s coasts.

Hurricane Irma, currently a category 5, is a hurricane so strong it may leave Puerto Rico without power for months. One can only imagine the type of damage that could do to a data center.

The storm has the ability to rip roofing straight off of buildings and destroy everything inside. A storm like this could take out data centers across the east coast depending on its pathway.

So it begs the question: If a storm like Irma rips through your data center, what can you do to prevent your server from going offline?

How to Protect Your Server Against Natural Disasters

Currently, most data centers run on a fault tolerant network, use backup generators, and more. This still may not be enough though! A large storm (or other natural disasters) can still take these data centers offline.

Protecting your server from natural disasters is doable, but requires specific planning on your part.

For starters, you need to ensure your server host’s data center is built to withstand natural disasters. It’s impossible to withstand all natural disasters, but a good deal of fault tolerance and redundancy will go a long way.

Still, this won’t stop you from extreme circumstances. To do that, you’ll have to go with a Geo-redundant cloud hosting setup. This setup makes use of two or more clouds in separate cities to drastically reduce the amount of possible downtime.

We’ll spare you the boring details, but this is the only way to ensure your servers are safe from natural disasters right now.

ServerPronto offers fewer outages and more uptime.