• On Friday President Obama issued a new executive order directing federal agencies to coordinate with state and local actors to increase the  ability to prepare for the impacts of climate change and to improve the resiliency of communities and infrastructure.  The order also establishes a task force, comprised of state, local and tribal officials that will advise the federal government on climate preparedness and resilience.  Such an announcement is timely as this past week marked the one year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy, the largest Atlantic hurricane ever recorded and, at an estimated cost of over $65 billion, the 2nd most expensive hurricane in US history. Twenty four states – mostly along the eastern seaboard of the United States – sustained physical and financial damage from the storm. The impact of the storm highlighted vulnerabilities of key infrastructure (e.g., roads, bridges, sewage, water, energy systems) that stemmed in part from a lack of investment in sufficient hardening, giving rise to questions regarding our preparedness as a nation for natural disasters, our mechanisms of response, and the appropriate roles for federal, state, and local governments, philanthropic organizations, and private sector entities in such events.

• As Hurricane Sandy made landfall Monday, the freak storm flooded data centers in New York City, taking down several major websites and services -- including The Huffington Post, Buzzfeed and Gawker -- that depended on them to run their businesses.
• Several websites stored their data at a lower Manhattan data center run by Datagram, whose basement was inundated with water during the storm, flooding generators that were intended to keep the power on. In a statement, Datagram said no customers lost data and that it was working to restore its emergency power systems.
• But the disruption clearly frustrated companies that relied on Datagram's services, and raised questions about why the company located its data center in a low-lying area.
• “How dumb to locate datacenter in a flood zone. And how dumb to host Gawker servers there,” Gawker publisher Nick Denton tweeted on Tuesday.
• George Reese, chief technology officer for enStratus, which helps companies manage their data, said companies often choose data centers based on cost.

• "In an ideal world, people select data centers based on their tolerance of natural disasters," he said. "In reality, real estate and power costs drive data center locations, with disasters being something you prepare for."

    

  "The critical thing is that you should never have all your data in one location or even in two locations susceptible to the same disaster," he added.

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• Hurricane Sandy: Initial Impact

    30 Oct, 2012 | 11:37 AM | By Doug Madory      

  Yesterday, Hurricane Sandy came ashore pummeling the east coast of the United States with high winds and torrential rains. The super storm caused major power and Internet outages in a region that is home to more than 60 million people. Unsurprisingly, the impacts on Internet connectivity have been severe. For instance, several major data centers in Manhattan lost power or were flooded.     Besides all the local impacts to the United States, New York City also happens to be a major hub of international telecommunications. As a result of outages there, we’ve observed Internet traffic shift away from the city as carriers scramble for alternative paths.

   

          

  As with Irene last year, we were in the path of this storm. In fact, our data center in Portsmouth, New Hampshire experienced multiple power outages in the last 12 hours. Despite this, our exceptional operations staff have continued delivering our services and products without interruption to our customers around the world.    The graphic on the left illustrates the locations of some of the Internet outages we observed in the impacted region at various points in time over the last 30 hours. Notice how New York and New Jersey bore the brunt of the damage as the storm progressed.

  Our Internet Health Portal (IHP) provides detailed reports about the current state of the Internet for any region in world. A screenshot from this tool is pictured on the right, showing outages by county in New York State. Impacted networks are identified by geolocation, organization, and severity, allowing for detailed assessments of natural disasters and, hopefully, more targeted remediation efforts.     This blog represents a quick overview of our data around this event. As we continue to examine the impacts of the hurricane and the recovery efforts, we will post additional findings. Stay tuned.

   

• Hurricane Sandy: Outage Animation

    31 Oct, 2012 | 1:57 PM | By Jim Cowie 

  Renesys continues to analyze the impacts on Internet connectivity from Hurricane Sandy.

   

   Here’s another quick view of the impact on the routing table as Sandy came ashore Monday night. Each square represents the fate of a set of networks geolocated within a common tenth-degree square of the Earth’s surface — at these latitudes, that’s about 90 square kilometers. 

   At one end of the scale, the darkest green indicates better than 99.95% of the networks are available. At the other end, solid red indicates that more than 5% of the networks at that location have been removed from the global routing table, meaning that they can’t be reached by anyone.

   

  Five percent doesn’t sound like much, but consider the Internet density in the affected areas! In fact, Manhattan’s outage rates were much higher — on the order of 10%, which is impressively low given the fact that ConEd cut power to much of the island. Silencing ten percent of the networks in the New York area is like taking out an entire country the size of Austria, in terms of impact on the global routing table. The 90% that survive are in data centers, running on generator power supplied by engineers who do not sleep much.

   

  It’s striking to observe not only the impacts in NYC, Long Island, and New Jersey, but also peripheral weather-related outages in the Washington DC area, and up the I-93 corridor from Boston into New Hampshire. The Internet has become a sensor network in its own right for determining where storm damage is occurring — and since BGP routing converges in realtime, that information literally becomes available within a few seconds.

• Where did people go online as Hurricane Sandy approached the U.S. East Coast?

    

  According to Canadian network equipment company Sandvine, the East Coast’s internet usage increased 114 percent on Monday, Oct. 29 between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., prior to Hurricane Sandy’s destructive landfall. The company’s blog produced the "East Coast Internet Traffic Comparison" chart below, illustrating a massive rise in digital activity:

    

  

    

  Sandvine’s internet usage data was taken from an unnamed U.S. city “that was directly in Sandy’s path,” per the company's website. The firm also found that traffic levels were elevated throughout the entire day, but began to dip after approximately 11 p.m.
• The blog notes that “no single application was responsible for the surge.” Still, movie streaming site Netflix increased its traffic by more that 150 percent on the East Coast, Sandvine observed. CNN reported that Netflix viewing doubled on the East Coast during the storm, according to the company itself. Apparently, watching films via the internet was a popular pastime for cities like New York, Philadelphia and Washington D.C as Sandy surged through.

• ZDNET points out that social media sites were highly affected by the epic storm as well, with over 1.1 million people mentioning the word “hurricane” on Twitter within a 21-hour period of time. Photo-sharing app Instagram also saw a staggering number of uploads as 10 storm-related pictures per second were produced. By Oct. 30, 244,000 photos were posted under the hashtag #sandy, with another 23,000 pictures under #frankenstorm.

    

  Sandvine also concluded that internet-based communication service Skype received up to a 122 percent spike in traffic. This makes some sense, considering the shoddy cell phone service many customers experienced in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. See the graph below for Skype statistics:

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