The Best Laid Disaster Recovery Plans Could Leave You On Your Own
Calamity descended from the skies around Washington on June 29 in the form of a derecho, a type of weather system so rare most people have never even heard of it. This unusual complex of extremely severe weather had never been known to cross a range of mountains such as the Alleghenies. But this time it happened, and disaster planning went out the window. Amazon’s huge data center near Dulles International Airport, fully redundant in itself, and served by redundant backup power and redundant power grids, redundant network access went down under the combined onslaught of massive power outages, massive Internet outages, phone line outages and cell system outages. Not only did everything go down, but nobody could call for backup. And, of course, even if the staff had known that this event was happening, they couldn’t have traveled there anyway. Most of the roads were blocked.
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