https://www.wired.com/story/data-centers-climate-change/
"When record temperatures wracked the UK in late July, Google Cloud’s data
centers in London went offline for a day, due to cooling failures. The impact
wasn’t limited to those near the center: That particular location services
customers in the US and Pacific region, with outages limiting their access to
key Google services for hours. Oracle’s cloud-based data center in the capital
was also struck down by the heat, causing outages for US customers. Oracle
blamed “unseasonal temperatures” for the blackout.
The UK Met Office, which monitors the weather, suggests that the record heat
was an augur of things to come, which means data centers need to prepare for a
new normal.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says there’s a 93 percent chance
that one year between now and 2026 will be the hottest on record. Nor will that
be a one-off. “For as long as we continue to emit greenhouse gases,
temperatures will continue to rise,” says Petteri Taalas, WMO secretary
general. “And alongside that, our oceans will continue to become warmer and
more acidic, sea ice and glaciers will continue to melt, sea level will
continue to rise, and our weather will become more extreme.”
That weather shift will have an impact on all human-made
infrastructure—including the data centers that keep our planet’s collective
knowledge online.
The question is whether they are prepared. “From my point of view, there is an
issue with existing data center stock that’s been built in the UK and Europe,”
says Simon Harris, head of critical infrastructure at data center consultancy
Business Critical Solutions. But it doesn’t stop there. Forty-five percent of
US data centers have experienced an extreme weather event that threatened their
ability to operate, according to a survey by the Uptime Institute, a digital
services standards agency."
Via
The RISKS Digest Volume 33 Issue 36:
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/33/36#subj4
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
