Today you can find data centers in the most unusual places, from an old military base at the South Pole to a Spanish chapel. McMurdo is a scientific research center for the U.S. and it’s located at the South Pole, ideal to keep data center cooling. An old Japanese coal mine, 100 meters underground, is home to 30 containers with 250 servers each. The containers can withstand an earthquake of 6.7 on the Richter scale. That data center is cooled by groundwater.

These centers survive odd and harsh conditions, but if an extremely powerful tornado or hurricane drops down a datacenter in the open, there’s not a lot that can be done. It’s an issue for the industry in the wake of a wave of powerful tornadoes and hurricanes and there’s a responsibility among architects to design buildings that are aware of their own natural surroundings.

“From a structural standpoint, you can design and construct a facility to withstand just about anything,” said Ron Vokoun, Mission Critical Market Leader, Western Region at JE Dunn Construction. “It comes down to how much you want to spend and weigh the extra costs against the benefits of locating in an area with these types of risks.”

“If you are located in Florida, is the pull of the ‘server hugger’ mentality so strong that you will spend extra money to build your data center close to home, or will you move it farther inland within the constraints of your latency requirements?” said Vokoun. “Do the incentives being offered by the Midwestern states offset the extra structural costs to build a data center that will withstand an F5 tornado?  In many cases they do.  It’s all about analyzing risk and TCO to make an informed business decision.”

Early Warning System

Data center expansion continues at a blistering pace in the market. Microsoft recently invested $250 million for a new Nordic data center that will provide additional capacity for Xbox and Windows Azure users. Facebook announced that it’s building an eco-friendly hydroelectric data center in Lulea, a small city located 600 miles north of Stockholm on the edge of the Arctic Circle.

Computer data and communications are at least as important as electricity to most businesses, and a disaster could put this important data at risk. This can prove expensive; the average manufacturing revenue loss due to IT downtime is $196,000 per company per year, estimates Computer Associates Technologies. Considering this, the idea of putting an alerting system in place may sound pretty good to many CIOs.

SunGard Availability Services unveiled a new weather alert system based on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) real time data to better inform and prepare disasters. The company uses real-time data from NOAA and big data analytics to provide an advance alert system in case of threatening storms and other natural disasters. SunGard Availability Services received 342 alerts from customers and 117 disaster declarations during Hurricane Sandy.

“Many companies overlook business continuity during severe storms simply because they aren’t prepared,” said Bob DiLossi, director, Crisis Management, SunGard Availability Services. “Through the years, we’ve listened to our customers’ needs and are proud to be among the first IT service providers offering a weather alert system free of charge. By using real time weather information combined with business analytics, we’re preparing our customers for what’s to come, giving them time to plan and take action.”

IBM has worked on a system that uses vibration sensors found within conventional computer hard disk drives–known as MEMS accelerometers–to accurately and precisely analyze data from seismic events such as earthquakes. Every modern hard drive has an accelerometer built into it and, with this invention, you can take the data off the device, network it together, analyze it, and generate actionable information that tells you in very fine detail what happened during an earthquake. It is a means to quickly learn what happened, receive a first estimate of what damage has been done, and help first responders determine where they should direct their emergency resources.

Business development provider Five Nines delivers a variety of different data center monitoring solutions and tools, depending on the data center to weatherproof it. Peak 10, a network operate of data centers across the southeast, offers a “Recovery Cloud” option with response team of IT leaders and engineers from several of its geographic operations  for companies who need the added security of rapid recovery of data lost during a disaster.

“People are the most critical part of any disaster recovery plan,” said Jeff Biggs, executive vice president of operations and technology for Peak 10. “Our national response team ensures that customers have the support they need locally while allowing our employees who are also affected by the disaster to tend to their families and homes. Deploying our response team is an added measure we take to ensure that our customers, and their mission-critical data and IT systems, are taken care of.”

The continuous changing nature of IT and related equipment, advances in communication along with increasing criticality of data makes it challenging for companies to comply with natural disaster. When it comes to data protection, many organizations go the extra mile to ensure protection of critical company data. Many companies choose to construct data centers that are F5 tornado resistant. F5 tornadoes have wind speed ranging from 261 – 318 mph.