Originally posted to Data Center Frontier by Rich Miller.
Data center professionals live with risk every day. They brainstorm ways to keep their facilities online during any kind of disaster. They seek to engineer solutions for every imaginable threat.
But Hurricane Harvey brought a whole new calculus to disaster risk, slamming the Texas Coast with 125 mile and hour winds and then stalling, drenching parts of the area with more than 50 inches of rain – more than any storm event in American history.
In the midst of calamity, the region’s data center teams secured their facilities and kept their customers online, including services that were vital to the region’s emergency response. There have been no reports of any major Houston data centers experiencing outages.
Houston area data center professionals executed their jobs under pressure. But the key decisions that kept the area’s facilities online were made years ago, during the site selection process. As waters rose beyond the 500-year-flood zones, flooding areas that had never been under threat, Houston’s data centers remained high and dry.
Some facilities were temporarily inaccessible due to water on surrounding access roads. Many providers housed staff on site throughout the crisis. As the waters begin to recede, the data center industry is shifting its attention to how it can help the region recover.
Here’s a look at how each of the Houston area providers managed during Hurricane Harvey:
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