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Earthquake in Japan: IBM Machines Kept Running
On March 11, Japan experienced a horrifically damaging 9.0 earthquake. Thousands of people lost their lives, and millions more experienced (and are experiencing) significant disruption. Google has helpfully provided an easy way to contribute to earthquake relief. Please contribute if you can. Japan and her people are incredibly generous in providing humanitarian assistance around the world, and the least we can all do is help Japan at this time of great need.
I am profoundly impressed with Japan's efforts to prepare for earthquakes and tsunami. Many more people would have died and been injured anywhere else in the world under similar conditions. As just one small aspect of Japan's resiliency, here are some photos from an IBM data center in Tokyo containing a variety of IBM servers (mainframe and non-mainframe).
Many of these IBM machines fell horizontally to the data center floor, bending frame metal and stretching cables. However, all these IBM servers kept running, which is a testament both to the IBM engineers who designed and built them and to the IBM data center planners and managers who sweated all the little details, including leaving enough slack in the cables. The IBM storage units kept running, too, with some concurrent error checking automatically triggered as a precaution. There were no service interruptions, and there was no need to switch over to a disaster recovery site.
In a disaster, mainframes offer a number of business resiliency advantages, particularly if there's a loss of a data center. Many mainframe customers have implemented IBM's Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS), for uniquely fast, automatic, predictable cross-site recovery with little or no service interruption. However, when protecting a business against disasters (including earthquakes and tsunami), "defense in depth" is a successful strategy. In this case, part of that defense included buying the best quality hardware combined with excellent installation and facilities management.
Would your equipment and data center work this well in comparable circumstances?
| by Timothy Sipples | March 30, 2011 in Current Affairs Permalink |
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Comments
Next Engenieer's to-do iten: make mainframe waterproof. =)
Posted by: knob | Mar 30, 2011 11:19:19 PM
Great to hear that. I hope Humans can be like servers too.
Posted by: Hardware for Distributed System | Apr 5, 2011 8:59:14 AM
I am profoundly impressed with Japan's efforts to prepare for earthquakes and tsunami. Many more people would have died and been injured anywhere else in the world under similar conditions. As just one small aspect of Japan's resiliency, here are some photos from an IBM data center in Tokyo containing a variety of IBM servers (mainframe and non-mainframe).
Posted by: Dating sites reviews | Jun 29, 2011 8:12:53 AM
