As Hurricane Sandy blew its way up the Eastern seaboard, it knocked out Datagram, the New York company that hosts Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post, and Gawker sites, among others. The Huffington Post and Buzzfeed appear to be back to business as usual, but Gawker's banner proclaims that it's a "backup" site.
Meanwhile, the big cloud providers weathered the storm with little or no downtime.
Apple, Amazon Web Services, and Rackspace prepared for Sandy's wrath, and it showed. According to its status page, Apple's iCloud went down on Tuesday, bringing down the game center for all users and FaceTime and iMessage for some. However, services came back up again quickly. Amazon Web Services experienced short disruptions to two of its services, CloudFront and EC2, but those disruptions were resolved in a matter of hours. Rackspace had a chat outage, some latency with Cloud DBaaS, and a few problems with Cloud Sites -- also resolved in a matter of hours.
Google escaped unscathed. It was even able to provide Sandy-related resources, such as a crisis map advising where to find hospitals and shelters in the wake of the storm. The Google Apps status dashboard lists no outages, even though one of Google's datacenters is in North Carolina, right in Sandy's path.
Google posted public alerts on Google Search and Maps during Hurricane Sandy. (Source: Google screenshot)
As for Datagram, it did have emergency systems, according to the official statement on its Website. However, those systems weren't enough protection from the basement flooding, which required Datagram to shut down all systems to avoid permanently damaging its equipment and possibly burning down the building. The Datagram Website says there wasn't any infrastructure damage. As of Oct. 31 at 1:55 p.m., Datagram was waiting for an update from Con Edison. It is providing backup services to customers from its Connecticut facility.
We could play Monday morning quarterback and say Datagram should have had its failover ready to go if the New York site went down. It can't use a rollup generator until Con Ed says it's OK. That is hampering its efforts to bring service back. And in New York, the situation is pretty disastrous: flooded subways, widespread power outages, lines several blocks deep just so residents can charge their cellphones in cafes. In a CNBC report,
Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti didn't blame Datagram for the outage. "They are good people and are working very hard to deal with this once in a hundred years situation," he said.
I sent Gawker an email, but so far I have gotten no response. Since the company is based in New York, its executives are probably among the people queued around a Starbucks waiting for a power outlet.
Overall, the cloud service providers kept their datacenters from failing. Customers who relied on their service providers experienced minimal service disruptions, if any, because the providers were prepared for the storm. There is no doubt that Datagram did its best to prevent an outage, but there is no way it could have predicted the kind of havoc Sandy wreaked.
The final lesson: There is no such thing as too much preparation. Apple, AWS, Rackspace, and Google were all ready for Sandy; the Boy Scouts would be proud. Datagram planned to use its Connecticut facility but wasn't anticipating just how bad Sandy would be. It was prepared -- but not for the worst.
Did you experience outages with your cloud providers during Sandy's rampage? How long did it take for you to get back up?
I is alwyas interesting to see who is prepared and who is not, and ofcourse the big names came out on top (Google, Apple and Rackspace). While some of the others as you mentioned wre ready but just not ready for everything she had. Google really did a number having maps and emergency service information ready was huge. They now want ot make it mandatory for cell phone providers to have service even when therei s no power and after a storm like Sandy. This is a great idea but so if you get service but have a dead phone how much good is that going to do. Or what if you have a generator and service but the people you are trying ot contact does not. This is nice but untill the country as a while can have power that does not waiver and cell service that doesnt either it does not make a lot of sense to demand that we have cell service. I mean granted I would like it to happen as well I know when Ike took out parts of Texas above Houston my family and myself had no power for three weeks but had a generator. Which means no phones but we did not depend on them like we do today either. It will be intersting to see in the future to see if all these companies made these changes and can stand up to a storm like Sandy in the future and how the cloud will have evolved.
the Internet appeared to weather (no pun intended) Sandy much better than the microburst in Virginia a few months before, which took out a *lot* of sites. I guess that ended up being a useful trial run.
Well, it's kind of more important than that. So many services and communications depend on the Internet now. During the previous hurricane (Irene?), public and news sites in New York were constantly crashed by the volume of traffic. Didn't seem to happen this time.
And it's not like the universe revolves around New York. New York just happens to be at the center of it. :)
Funny thing about the Internet, Kim. It was (aprocryphally) designed to survive nuclear war, so why is anybody surprised that it survived a little bad weather? I mean, really, it's not like the Universe revolves around New York or anything. Buncha sissies, whining about the weather. Geez, that upsets me so much, I'm going to go down and sit on the beach here in southern California, and think up new ways to mock those Down East. Seriously, it's terrible that folks have been out of water and electricity for what's coming up on a couple of weeks now, so the idea that the Internet is doing just nicely, thanks, is almost funny. But it's what we do, and who we are, and we can't help a little quiet pride at being able to (wait for it) weather a storm or two. Perhaps we can put the electrical grid into the cloud, and that will help get people through this disaster a little more easily. At this point, I'm certain they'll try anything.
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Whenever I whip out my BlackBerry Bold in public, someone will undoubtedly say, "Oh, how cute. You still use a BlackBerry." Yes, I do, and I'll use it until the day I die.
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Microsoft's recent decision to bundle its Office software with business partner offerings indicates that cloud software may be in the news, but licensed packages are still in demand for failover.
The Amazon smartphone rumor and the Apple mini-iPad rumor show that the mobile device giants think they have to be in all the device spaces to win. Why? Because the cloud can create an ecosystem where every device can cooperate to support the user, and if you don't supply all the devices you miss out on the total value.
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While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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