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Could Weather War Kill US Computer Networks? How Vulnerable Are Our Data Centers?
The United States is no stranger to extreme weather. These natural disasters could tear down buildings, destroy infrastructure, and possibly even leave a city in ruins.
New Amazon Datacenter Sterling VA
Image Source: xcorex Creative Commons 2.0
This country has experienced 3 Category 5 hurricanes since 1934, 58 T5 tornadoes since 1950, and 1,319 earthquakes with a 5.0 magnitude or higher since 1900.
So consider this: What would happen if one of these monster forces of nature were to hit a major cloud data center? Here’s an examination of the potential impact, but to see just how influential some of these clouds are, it’ll be assumed that the respective cloud providers have no protocol for a power outage (although this is not the case).
Worst Case Scenario
Where would the most damaging hit be? It’s debatable, but the most detrimental hit may be in Virginia. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has one of their major centers in Northern Virginia. Rackspace—probably its closest competitor—has two data centers in Virginia, as well. And Virginia isn’t a stranger to natural disasters. Between 1851 and 2009, 12 hurricanes hit the state of Virginia.
Unfortunately, according to a 2010 article in Nature Geoscience, some projections (based on high-resolution dynamical models and on theory) show that the globally averaged intensity of tropical cyclones will shift toward storms that are stronger. Greenhouse warming would cause this shift, and the storm intensity is projected to increase 2-11% by 2100. While there are studies that project a decrease in the globally averaged frequency of tropical cyclones, there are also projections that there will be increases in the frequency of the strongest cyclones.
Hypothetically, if an incredibly strong storm pummeled through the centers located in Virginia, the Internet could suffer greatly. When only considering Amazon’s cloud (including all of its data centers), an incredible amount of information would be affected. In a study involving millions of people, ⅓ of those surveyed reported visiting a website every day that used Amazon’s infrastructure. In 2011, Amazon’s S3 cloud stored 762 billion objects. It’s possible that Amazon’s cloud alone holds an entire 1% of the Internet. READMORE HERE
