How Japan's data centers survived the earthquake

IDG News Service - Smart construction and good planning allowed Japan's data centers to survive the massive earthquake that rocked the country in March, a Japanese data center executive said last late month at the DatacenterDynamics conference in San Francisco.

IT managers in Japan had to grapple with blackouts and shortages of generator fuel, but none of Japan's data centers was severely damaged or knocked offline by the disaster, said Atsushi Yamanaka, a general manager at IDC Frontier, which operates data centers for Yahoo Japan and other clients.

Modern data centers in Japan are built on giant "shock absorbers" -- isolators made from metal and rubber on which buildings "float" while the ground beneath shakes from side to side.

Some data centers also have floor-level and rack-level isolators, Yamanaka said, and all server racks are secured firmly to the floor. "I see some U.S. data centers with racks just sitting on the floor, and you don't see that in Japan," he said.

The shock absorbers are most effective at the building level, Yamanaka said, and some of those at the rack level did not work during the earthquake. Nevertheless, he said, only five server racks were critically damaged in all of Japan's data centers.

Disaster recovery plans generally went smoothly. Where power was cut off, uninterruptible power supplies and generators kicked in, and companies were quick to order more fuel, Yamanaka said.

This version of this story was originally published in Computerworld's print edition. It was adapted from an article that appeared earlier on Computerworld.com.