Looking for recommendations for Datacenter off CA Faultline

Tue Jul 20 04:06:55 UTC 2004

David Lesher <wb8foz at nrk.com>, wrote:
>
> Speaking on Deep Background, the Press Secretary whispered:
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > Lots of stuff from Wall Street Financial houses set up their backups in 
> > Kansas City.
>
> Is there a backup site in those KC limestone mines? 
>
> Only thing is, where's the New Madrid fault....?

Reasonably far away from Wall Street.   <grin>

The whole idea behind 'geographically diverse' backups is not to have a
place where 'nothing can happen to knock it out', but to have places
such that _no_single_event_ can clobber everything.

If New Madrid lets go, *and* San Andreas lets go at the same time, a *lot*
of places will have _real_ troubles.

Heck, not that many years ago, when the Chicago River 'sprang a leak' and
took out most of Chicago's business district -- it turned out that there
was not enough 'hot site' reserve capacity in _all_of_North_America_ to 
accomodate all the _downtown_Chicago_only_ sites that pulled the trigger
on their emergency backup plan.  One of my then clients activated their
contract backup plan about 4 hours into the mess.  They got the last 
available systme in San Diego (closest thing available).  If they'd been
10 minutes later, it would have been Hawaii.  (The systems group was
*really*  wishing managemnt _had_ waffled for another 10-15 minutes! :)

There _were_ a bunch of slower-reacting sites that got told "sorry, we're
full up.  No room at the inn."

I hate to think what things would have been like if it had been something
that affected the 'suburban' data-center facilities as well.  Not to mention
something like New Madrid cutting loose, and taking out St. Louis, Kansas
City, Des Moines, and a bunch of other places, as well as Chicago.