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lightning

Google must have done something to anger the gods, for they have blasted one of Google's European data centers with lightning not one time, not twice, not thrice, but four times. The incident was serious enough that the information center actually lost some data, which is exactly what data centers are supposed to avoid.

This incident occurred at Google's europe-west1-b data center in Belgium on August 17th. This data heart houses a diversity of content, merely the afflicted disks were handling Google Compute Engine (GCE) instances. The GCE service allows businesses to shop information and run virtual computers in the cloud. Later on the four lightning strikes, some of these drives started returning I/O errors in their GCE instances. At the peak of the calamity, most 5% of the disks in the data center were experiencing I/O errors. Google was able to restore many of the drives to working condition and save the data, only 0.000001% of the data in europe-west1-b was irrecoverably lost.

Big information centers take systems in place to prevent data loss in the result of electric interference, and Google is obviously no exception. Notwithstanding, four successive lightning strikes on the electric systems of its data middle pushed the buffering and backups to their limits. The servers have battery backups, and the edifice itself has a total auxiliary power system. Google says these both flipped on every bit expected to forbid damage to the disks. Nevertheless, some recently written data was stored on systems that were more susceptible to power failure or repeated battery drain. This would exist the 5% of originally affected storage.

Google data center

Google says it is already in the procedure of transitioning all its storage hardware abroad from the configuration that made this failure possible, and most of it is already running on the new system. That's why only a pocket-size fraction of GCE instances were affected. So I approximate the adept news is that even 4 lightning strikes on the data center's power system wasn't enough to impact virtually of the disks google is running. If this had happened a few months downwardly the line, there might not have been whatsoever negative impact.

That might not exist comforting to the handful of customers who permanently lost data in their GCE instances. While Google accepts total responsibility for the failure, it also points out that GCE is by its nature tied to a unmarried data center. Customers who are especially worried might want to utilise GCE snapshots and Google Cloud Storage for geographically contained systems.