[Foundation-l] Is the WMF spending its (our or our donors) money irrationally?

[George Herbert]

On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 8:57 AM, Jon Davis <wiki at konsoletek.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 07:59, emijrp <emijrp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> What about hurricanes? ; )
>>
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Florida_hurricane_%28pre-1900%29_tracks.jpg
>>
>>
> Maybe that's why the new Datacenter is being built in Virginia [1]?  The
> reality is that no where is safe from natural disasters.  Everywhere you go,
> there is going to be some new and creative way for nature to level your
> datacenter (Hence replication).
>
>
> -Jon
>
> [1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_Projects/Data_Center_Virginia

A particularly nasty hurricane could level Florida and continue on to
do damage to Virginia as well, but Virginia is more structural damage
resistant (peak winds drop rapidly inland).  However, odds are low.

As someone who does DR and IT dependability professionally, you get
the level of redundancy you can reasonably pay for.  Nothing can be
100% sure not to have failures.  You're more likely to have outages
and lose data due to people than anything else.  Software failures
less than that, Hardware failures less than that.  Environment is
statistically the least, below 10%.  Very complex environments with
multiple sites and failover generally don't have single-cause
attributable outages, though in rare cases engineering and design
missed something and a single point of failure remains and fails.

Everything only being in Florida was a major risk factor, but we're
long past that.



-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com