Monday, October 29, 2012

Why Hurricane Sandy Matters To The Pacific Northwest's Tech Industry

What does an East Coast hurricane (and potential mega-storm) have to do with the Pacific Northwest's technology industry? One reason: Amazon Web Services has its East Coast data center (the data center which took out a chunk of the Internet's web businesses last week due to some downtime) in Ashburn, Virginia, which is squarely within the range of Hurricane Sandy, which was bearing down on the region as of Monday morning. Amazon's Service Health Dashboard said that the company's US East Region team was making all possible preparations for the storm--with generator fuel, food/water, flashlights, radios, extra staff--as the storm approached. Satellite maps from the National Hurricane Center forecasting the center of Sandy just missing Amazon's East Coast data center in Ashburn tomorrow morning.