How Data Center Operator IPR Survived Sandy

Nerval's Lobster writes "At the end of October, Hurricane Sandy struck the eastern seaboard of the United States, leaving massive amounts of property damage in its wake. Data center operators in Sandy's path were forced to take extreme measures to keep their systems up and running. While flooding and winds knocked some of them out of commission, others managed to keep their infrastructure online until the crisis passed. In our previous interview, we spoke with CoreSite, a Manhattan-based data center that endured even as much of New York City went without power. For this installment, Slashdot Datacenter sat down with executives from IPR, which operates two data centers—in Wilmington, Delaware and Reading, Pennsylvania—close to Sandy's track as it made landfall over New Jersey and pushed northwest."

Ducked the most important question

[joeflies]

In his response to the question "So you suffered no downtime at all?", the business development manager provided a non-answer to a yes/no question. The interviewer should have followed that question up to clarify.

Re:generators

[LoRdTAW]

I work next to a Verizon data center out here in Farmingdale, Long Island (supposedly all the Verizon cell phone traffic for long island). They recently built extensions to the building and had two large diesel generators installed, a 15,000 gallon fuel tank along with two large cooling systems. Turns out they needed it.

During the aftermath they didn't run out of diesel because they bought in an additional on site 15,000 gallon fuel tank (in a 40 foot container). Plus they had semi trucks with sleeper tractors from out of state with trailers full of diesel ready to fill the tanks back up on site 24/7. Armed guards manned the premises 24/7 and lived out of a mobile home. They also bought in generator powered flood lights to keep the surrounding property lit up like it was day light. Those generators sounded like a pair of locomotives running, and probably because they use engines of similar size. My manager found out they burn 4000 gallons of diesel a day keeping the building going. They ran the generators until the 7th or 8th. So they burned something like 40,000+ gallons of fuel in that time frame.

If you have the money and the right infrastructure, you can keep the power going as long as you need.