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lightning

Google must have done something to acrimony the gods, for they take blasted one of Google's European information centers with lightning not one time, not twice, not thrice, but four times. The incident was serious enough that the data 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 heart in Belgium on August 17th. This data middle houses a variety of content, but the afflicted disks were handling Google Compute Engine (GCE) instances. The GCE service allows businesses to shop data and run virtual computers in the cloud. After the iv lightning strikes, some of these drives started returning I/O errors in their GCE instances. At the top of the cataclysm, about 5% of the disks in the data centre were experiencing I/O errors. Google was able to restore many of the drives to working condition and salvage the data, but 0.000001% of the data in europe-west1-b was irrecoverably lost.

Big information centers have systems in place to forbid data loss in the effect of electrical interference, and Google is obviously no exception. However, four successive lightning strikes on the electrical systems of its data center pushed the buffering and backups to their limits. The servers have battery backups, and the building itself has a full auxiliary power organisation. Google says these both flipped on as expected to forestall damage to the disks. Even so, some recently written data was stored on systems that were more susceptible to ability failure or repeated battery bleed. This would be the 5% of originally affected storage.

Google data center

Google says it is already in the process of transitioning all its storage hardware away from the configuration that fabricated this failure possible, and most of information technology is already running on the new arrangement. That's why only a pocket-size fraction of GCE instances were afflicted. So I judge the skilful news is that even iv lightning strikes on the information center'due south ability system wasn't plenty to bear on most of the disks google is running. If this had happened a few months downwards the line, there might not accept been whatsoever negative bear upon.

That might not exist comforting to the handful of customers who permanently lost data in their GCE instances. While Google accepts full responsibleness for the failure, it too points out that GCE is by its nature tied to a single data center. Customers who are particularly worried might want to use GCE snapshots and Google Cloud Storage for geographically independent systems.