I don’t often re-post vendor marketing content – but since they let me be a small part of simulating a hurricane/flood of a datacenter …
Symantec rented out a 6-story hurricane (100mph) simulator in South Carolina … and then flooded a working datacenter server-stack with 35,000 gallons of water:
Most folks know me as a 23-year backup dude, but high-availability and BC/DR have always been part of my world too: from Netware SFTIII to Microsoft WolfPack (clusters). So, when Symantec wanted to test their availability solution and invited me behind-the-scenes, I jumped on a plane. Like you, I have read about or even repeated second-hand stories about major weather impacts to IT datacenters, but this was a chance to see one up close. Admittedly, I was hoping that servers would explode, instead of just short out from the water, but it was still fun.
At 0:32, Symantec is explaining to me what should happen during the crisis.
At 2:07, I confirmed that their multi-tiered application failed over seamlessly to a different datacenter.
Here is their Behind The Scenes video from http://symantec.com/businesscontinuity:
EMBED-2 (not yet avail)
My perspectives are from 3:33-4:44.
Symantec, thanks for letting me be a small part of a very cool day.
Thanks for watching.