7 ms·

This is a great example of one of those investments that might feel like a waste, until it suddenly REALLY isn't. I wish I had this video during my infosec & H

by sjbase 9y ago

This is a great example of one of those investments that might feel like a waste, until it suddenly REALLY isn't. I wish I had this video during my infosec & HA consulting days.

Symbiote 9y ago
I live in seismicly boring Europe, so I have no idea what damage would be caused without this floor. Many broken hard drives? Or worse?
- mschuster91 9y ago
  All drives broken at the very least, a 10k rpm drive doesn't like ordinary vibrations already, much less 40cm+ displacement in a fraction of a second. Heavy servers and especially UPS battery rows would likely take the whole rack down/toppling over with them. Plus: most cabling is secured to the walls/floors with not very much slack, which means a LOT of damaged/torn cables and FUBAR'd ports. All in all, if an earthquake of the scale in the video would hit a typical European DC, it's bye-bye and rebuild.
  - dmix 9y ago
    Forgive my uninformed question but I remember seeing a video many years ago where a (Samsung?) hard-drive had built-in protection from being dropped. The disk will stop spinning within a millisecond when it detects movement. They could survive a sudden drop onto a floor. I assumed this was a common feature of modern disk based hard-drives. Could built-in protections like this in harddrives be a sufficient protection in an earthquake? What other moving parts are that at risk here? Assuming the servers themselves are locked in cages, I wouldn't expect them to crash to the floor. Although the big difference here is it's not a sudden drop but a prolonged forceful shaking.
    - AlephGarden 9y ago
      That keeps your data safe, but (and I'm guessing here) quite plausibly means filesystem writes may likely start failing, causing services on the affected server to start failing. If you need uptime during an earthquake, then that's not sufficient.
      - jacquesm 9y ago
        Why guess? From the article on the sensor: "When the computer is stable, the drive operates normally again." So unless you install a drive that has its own motion detection on board the computer will simply quickly 'park' the drive and will allow it to resume operation without any issues when it has landed.
        avh02 9y ago
        to be fair, AlephGarden did say during an earthquake. Telecoms, Hospitals, etc, perhaps wouldn't be happy with being out for the time taken for an earthquake to blow over. Plus aftershocks when damage control is in progress.
        jacquesm 9y ago
        They'd be a lot happier with being out for that time rather than having to replace a bunch of hardware.
    - sly010 9y ago
      A typical accelerometer can detect free falling and the hard drive can spin down before it hits the ground. I guess in that sense being shaken is worse than being dropped "suddenly".
    - rzzzt 9y ago
      Sudden motion detection [1] is built into many notebooks, and also allows you to use your MacBook as a lightsaber. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_Motion_Sensor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_Motion_Sensor
      - i336_ 9y ago
        And thinkpads. I used it to add X11 autorotation to an X61 tablet. No spin animation, but it was a cool one-day hack nonetheless. The fun part was that the orientation analyses was done from a shell script, and actually worked 100% of the time (unlike so many phones)! \o/ The insane part was that DRM/KMS on Linux is 1000% crazy and I had to patch the kernel to stop poking the backlight on every. rotation. event, grr. (I had to do it in the kernel - I basically killed DPMS - because X11 libdrm is utterly incomprehensible.)
      - giobox 9y ago
        These were fun, but if i remember rightly, Apple have largely phased the Sudden Motion Sensor out on all their laptop models that come SSD only, which is increasingly almost all of them. There were some ridiculous examples of using it to sort mail into folders in mail.app as well, by tilting the MacBook left and right.
  - franciscop 9y ago
    Just guessing, but situations like these might be the place where it will make sense first to use server-side SSDs. While probably not there yet, it makes sense as the gap narrows that some day the cost of using SSDs is cheaper than building a whole floating/moving floor.
    - csydas 9y ago
      The SSDs address part of the problem. As noted by another post here, many rooms are build and structured with the assumption that nothing ever moves, so rather reasonably, you lay cable in a manner that has little flexibility, you mount things to floors/walls, and so on. The data integrity is important, but the physical design and layout makes a rather big assumption that the infrastructure you're mounting stuff on will not move or vibrate.
      - Piskvorrr 9y ago
        Plus the DC itself might be running, but now you could be running it on a generator (no outside power); better hope you can get a fuel truck to it before the 1-week tank runs out (are there truckable roads outside now?). And connectivity - you might have line slack inside your building, but the fiber cables might be broken in several locations before they even get to next active element (which is also earthquake-proofed? And powered? For how long?); so perhaps you're down to the radio fallback (hope the antennas aren't misaligned too much, let alone that their masts are still upright); again, assuming that the other end of the link is operable. In other words, preparing for vis major is far harder than it looks. Doable? Yes, if you're willing to go all the way to military-grade resilient comms...for a military-grade budget. Far easier to failover to a DC in a different zone.
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    > All drives broken at the very least, a 10k rpm drive doesn't like ordinary vibrations already, much less 40cm+ displacement in a fraction of a second. Do commercial server drives not have the same anti-shock tech as laptop drives?
    - rtkwe 9y ago
      Drops are easier because there's a gap of free fall before the actual hit so there's time to sense and park the heads. Earthquakes are more instantaneous where the shaking is the first warning the protection can react to.
  - Piskvorrr 9y ago
    Which gets you into that boring part of actuary calculations. In seismically inactive parts, "bye-bye and rebuild (while the cluster is running from a geographically remote datacenter, and only a slight increase in latency indicates this)" could be an order of magnitude cheaper, and thus preferable. In other words, downtime is not replaceable, hardware is.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- i336_ 9y ago
  I remember reading on http://reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport http://reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport some time ago (I unfortunately don't remember what thread) about someone who decided to move their server rack. Said rack had a UPS, but no wheels. The 10k HDDs in the blades didn't really like it...
- Numberwang 9y ago
  I remember us having some server issues a few years back when they were blowing up rocks for the foundation for a new mall a few 100 meters away in Stockholm. You never know.
sp332 9y ago
Apple's new giant circle can move 4.5 feet! https://www.wired.com/2017/05/apple-park-new-silicon-valley-campus/ https://www.wired.com/2017/05/apple-park-new-silicon-valley-...
- sanswork 9y ago
  One of cap Gemini's offices in the UK is built on springs and has a dry moat. Though I think that was for bomb attacks not earth quakes.
  - Piskvorrr 9y ago
    The moat might also be useful when besieged.
- ehnto 9y ago
  I can't help but chuckle at a writer using the term "insanely great" to describe the building. It lacks a certain potency in the context of a book's tagline! Perhaps it's a symptom of the exagerated language pop culture uses for average things diluting the power of other possible words. The article was however, "fairly excellent".
  - wierdaaron 9y ago
    "Insanely great" is a Steve Jobs-ism, so in the context of Apple it's usually a reference to that.
    - ehnto 9y ago
      Oh I see, that makes sense then. Thank you for the clarification!
uremog 9y ago
This feature is built into a lot of critical infra there, like airports. As I'm sure you know, the more common (and costly) it is, the better investment it is.
- dx034 9y ago
  But apparently no protection against power surges /s http://fortune.com/2017/05/31/british-airways-it-collapse-servers-power-surge/ http://fortune.com/2017/05/31/british-airways-it-collapse-se...

by sjbase 9y ago

This is a great example of one of those investments that might feel like a waste, until it suddenly REALLY isn't. I wish I had this video during my infosec & HA consulting days.

Symbiote 9y ago

I live in seismicly boring Europe, so I have no idea what damage would be caused without this floor. Many broken hard drives? Or worse?

mschuster91 9y ago
All drives broken at the very least, a 10k rpm drive doesn't like ordinary vibrations already, much less 40cm+ displacement in a fraction of a second. Heavy servers and especially UPS battery rows would likely take the whole rack down/toppling over with them. Plus: most cabling is secured to the walls/floors with not very much slack, which means a LOT of damaged/torn cables and FUBAR'd ports. All in all, if an earthquake of the scale in the video would hit a typical European DC, it's bye-bye and rebuild.
- dmix 9y ago
  Forgive my uninformed question but I remember seeing a video many years ago where a (Samsung?) hard-drive had built-in protection from being dropped. The disk will stop spinning within a millisecond when it detects movement. They could survive a sudden drop onto a floor. I assumed this was a common feature of modern disk based hard-drives. Could built-in protections like this in harddrives be a sufficient protection in an earthquake? What other moving parts are that at risk here? Assuming the servers themselves are locked in cages, I wouldn't expect them to crash to the floor. Although the big difference here is it's not a sudden drop but a prolonged forceful shaking.
  - AlephGarden 9y ago
    That keeps your data safe, but (and I'm guessing here) quite plausibly means filesystem writes may likely start failing, causing services on the affected server to start failing. If you need uptime during an earthquake, then that's not sufficient.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      Why guess? From the article on the sensor: "When the computer is stable, the drive operates normally again." So unless you install a drive that has its own motion detection on board the computer will simply quickly 'park' the drive and will allow it to resume operation without any issues when it has landed.
      - avh02 9y ago
        to be fair, AlephGarden did say during an earthquake. Telecoms, Hospitals, etc, perhaps wouldn't be happy with being out for the time taken for an earthquake to blow over. Plus aftershocks when damage control is in progress.
        jacquesm 9y ago
        They'd be a lot happier with being out for that time rather than having to replace a bunch of hardware.
  - sly010 9y ago
    A typical accelerometer can detect free falling and the hard drive can spin down before it hits the ground. I guess in that sense being shaken is worse than being dropped "suddenly".
  - rzzzt 9y ago
    Sudden motion detection [1] is built into many notebooks, and also allows you to use your MacBook as a lightsaber. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_Motion_Sensor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_Motion_Sensor
    - i336_ 9y ago
      And thinkpads. I used it to add X11 autorotation to an X61 tablet. No spin animation, but it was a cool one-day hack nonetheless. The fun part was that the orientation analyses was done from a shell script, and actually worked 100% of the time (unlike so many phones)! \o/ The insane part was that DRM/KMS on Linux is 1000% crazy and I had to patch the kernel to stop poking the backlight on every. rotation. event, grr. (I had to do it in the kernel - I basically killed DPMS - because X11 libdrm is utterly incomprehensible.)
    - giobox 9y ago
      These were fun, but if i remember rightly, Apple have largely phased the Sudden Motion Sensor out on all their laptop models that come SSD only, which is increasingly almost all of them. There were some ridiculous examples of using it to sort mail into folders in mail.app as well, by tilting the MacBook left and right.
- franciscop 9y ago
  Just guessing, but situations like these might be the place where it will make sense first to use server-side SSDs. While probably not there yet, it makes sense as the gap narrows that some day the cost of using SSDs is cheaper than building a whole floating/moving floor.
  - csydas 9y ago
    The SSDs address part of the problem. As noted by another post here, many rooms are build and structured with the assumption that nothing ever moves, so rather reasonably, you lay cable in a manner that has little flexibility, you mount things to floors/walls, and so on. The data integrity is important, but the physical design and layout makes a rather big assumption that the infrastructure you're mounting stuff on will not move or vibrate.
    - Piskvorrr 9y ago
      Plus the DC itself might be running, but now you could be running it on a generator (no outside power); better hope you can get a fuel truck to it before the 1-week tank runs out (are there truckable roads outside now?). And connectivity - you might have line slack inside your building, but the fiber cables might be broken in several locations before they even get to next active element (which is also earthquake-proofed? And powered? For how long?); so perhaps you're down to the radio fallback (hope the antennas aren't misaligned too much, let alone that their masts are still upright); again, assuming that the other end of the link is operable. In other words, preparing for vis major is far harder than it looks. Doable? Yes, if you're willing to go all the way to military-grade resilient comms...for a military-grade budget. Far easier to failover to a DC in a different zone.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  > All drives broken at the very least, a 10k rpm drive doesn't like ordinary vibrations already, much less 40cm+ displacement in a fraction of a second. Do commercial server drives not have the same anti-shock tech as laptop drives?
  - rtkwe 9y ago
    Drops are easier because there's a gap of free fall before the actual hit so there's time to sense and park the heads. Earthquakes are more instantaneous where the shaking is the first warning the protection can react to.
- Piskvorrr 9y ago
  Which gets you into that boring part of actuary calculations. In seismically inactive parts, "bye-bye and rebuild (while the cluster is running from a geographically remote datacenter, and only a slight increase in latency indicates this)" could be an order of magnitude cheaper, and thus preferable. In other words, downtime is not replaceable, hardware is.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
i336_ 9y ago
I remember reading on http://reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport http://reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport some time ago (I unfortunately don't remember what thread) about someone who decided to move their server rack. Said rack had a UPS, but no wheels. The 10k HDDs in the blades didn't really like it...
Numberwang 9y ago
I remember us having some server issues a few years back when they were blowing up rocks for the foundation for a new mall a few 100 meters away in Stockholm. You never know.

sp332 9y ago

Apple's new giant circle can move 4.5 feet! https://www.wired.com/2017/05/apple-park-new-silicon-valley-campus/ https://www.wired.com/2017/05/apple-park-new-silicon-valley-...

sanswork 9y ago
One of cap Gemini's offices in the UK is built on springs and has a dry moat. Though I think that was for bomb attacks not earth quakes.
- Piskvorrr 9y ago
  The moat might also be useful when besieged.
ehnto 9y ago
I can't help but chuckle at a writer using the term "insanely great" to describe the building. It lacks a certain potency in the context of a book's tagline! Perhaps it's a symptom of the exagerated language pop culture uses for average things diluting the power of other possible words. The article was however, "fairly excellent".
- wierdaaron 9y ago
  "Insanely great" is a Steve Jobs-ism, so in the context of Apple it's usually a reference to that.
  - ehnto 9y ago
    Oh I see, that makes sense then. Thank you for the clarification!

uremog 9y ago

This feature is built into a lot of critical infra there, like airports. As I'm sure you know, the more common (and costly) it is, the better investment it is.

dx034 9y ago
But apparently no protection against power surges /s http://fortune.com/2017/05/31/british-airways-it-collapse-servers-power-surge/ http://fortune.com/2017/05/31/british-airways-it-collapse-se...