Could a Category 5 Hurricane Take Down East Coast Data Centers?

TheNextCorner writes "With more data moving into the cloud, there is an increasing danger of data loss when one of these cloud computing data centers fails. Hurricanes pose a real threat to infrastructure located in Virginia and North Carolina, where Google, Apple & Facebook have opened large data centers. 'Where would the most damaging hit be? It's debatable, but the most detrimental hit may be in Virginia. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has one of their major centers in Northern Virginia. ... In a study involving millions of people, a third of those surveyed reported visiting a website every day that used Amazon's infrastructure. In 2011, Amazon's S3 cloud stored 762 billion objects. It's possible that Amazon's cloud alone holds an entire 1% of the Internet.' Could a category 5 Hurricane become a problem for these cloud data centers and take down parts the Internet?"

Category 5 Hurricane

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Could a category 5 Hurricane become a problem for these cloud data centers and take down parts the Internet?"

Only if they haven't switched to Cat 6 cables yet.

You're asking if a hurricane can take down a cloud

[cvtan]

A regular cloud yes, but not an iCloud.

Re:Priorities

[Sponge Bath]

500000 deaths due to hurricanes...

The original poster must have been using seasonal adjustments. Depending on the month, a category 5 hurricane can actually result in population growth.

Re:Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like the baby boom that will occur around March 2013 from the storm that blacked out the DC area for a few days. With the lack of power I could hear my neighbors better. 4 of them are now expecting. Every time one of them says "we did not try to get pregnant" I want to slap them.

Re:Priorities

[Zephyn]

Once an F5 tornado pulls the roof off the server building, you'll really see how data migrates into the cloud.