Heavy rains in Henan caused power outages in the data room and paralyzed many websites. How important is disaster preparedness?

For large-scale information systems, disasters not only refer to natural disasters, but also various man-made factors. In order to resist these risks, the concept of disaster preparedness came into being.

The flood situation in Henan affects the hearts of the people across the country.

The heavy rain caused the people of the whole province to pay a huge amount of property losses and even threatened the safety of their lives.

The virtual world is not peaceful either.

The heavy rainfall caused power outages in many computer rooms and data centers, and many websites were paralyzed as a result.

On the evening of the 20th, Jinjiang Literature issued an article stating that the remote backbone computer room where Jinjiang Literature City’s main website business is located is in Zhengzhou. The computer room was out of power due to heavy rain, causing some lines to become unstable and even unable to open the web page.

360 Bidding issued an announcement that due to heavy rain in Henan, the computer room failed, and some reports could not be queried.

Service providers such as Western Digital, Jingan Networks and other service providers in Zhengzhou area had power outages in their computer rooms and were forced to use diesel engines for power supply.

Heavy rains severely damaged Henan's Internet infrastructure.

Speaking of natural disasters and data centers, we have to mention disaster preparedness systems.

For large-scale information systems, disasters not only refer to natural disasters, but also various man-made factors. In order to resist these risks, the concept of disaster preparedness came into being.

Almost all small and medium enterprises in the World Trade Center went bankrupt. Due to the lack of a disaster disaster system and necessary measures, the Bank of New York completely destroyed its data center, interrupted communications, and ceased bankruptcy a few months later. 

Growing up, Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley, which have gradually improved their disaster recovery systems, resumed all their businesses in a very short period of time. 

After that, Deutsche Bank divided a total of 4,000 employees and the resources of the global bank to complete the operation of the business in a very short period of time. Morgan Stanley’s office on the 25th floor of the World Trade Center was completely destroyed, but a second office was established in the disaster recovery center within half an hour, and all business was restored. 

 The occurrence of the 9/11 incident has made all enterprises understand the recovery of disaster preparedness. 

 With the advent of the information age, cyber attacks, hardware damage, system breakdowns, and internal incidents of employees occur, due to natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, etc., while data centers are paralyzed, and even data loss may occur from time to time.

• In 2000, the eight major websites in the United States were attacked by DDoS, and some websites were paralyzed for 3 days, causing about 1.2 billion U.S. dollars in economic losses.

• In 2009, Taipei Taoyuan Airport was down for 36 hours due to damage to the hard disk of the airport EMC system.

• In 2013, the London Stock Exchange was suspended for nearly 7 hours due to the breakdown of its computer system.

Disaster preparedness has become a measure of the level of a company's technical level of resistance to risks. Nowadays, Internet companies, large and small, more or less have their own disaster recovery system or disaster recovery plan.

The disaster recovery system has three levels:

Data-level disaster recovery

Data-level disaster recovery mainly focuses on data. How to protect data from being destroyed when a disaster occurs? The earliest data-level disaster recovery was accomplished by trucks transporting hard drives. Now it is mainly done through the synchronization of ultra-large-capacity optical fiber data between data centers.

Application-level disaster recovery

Application-level disaster recovery mainly focuses on whether the application can be continued. Usually, a complete support system is backed up in the remote disaster recovery center to ensure that when the main production center has a problem, the production center can be immediately switched to shorten the system downtime.

Business-level disaster recovery

Business-level disaster preparedness is generally considered to be the highest-level disaster preparedness solution, which not only needs to back up all codes, but also includes offline rules and regulations and personnel composition.

The flood disaster in Henan caused many websites to be paralyzed, but in a short period of time, most of the websites resumed operation. Obviously, it was the credit of the disaster recovery system.

However, because the affected websites do not undertake financial services, the data center level may be relatively low and will be more affected by the flood. Data centers that undertake financial services can withstand ordinary natural disasters, and the impact may not be so great.