
Server room with seismic isolation floor in Japan earthquake disaster [video] - DamnInteresting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXwQSCStRaw
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sjbase
This is a great example of one of those investments that might feel like a
waste, until it suddenly REALLY isn't.

I wish I had this video during my infosec & HA consulting days.

~~~
Symbiote
I live in seismicly boring Europe, so I have no idea what damage would be
caused without this floor. Many broken hard drives? Or worse?

~~~
mschuster91
All drives broken at the very least, a 10k rpm drive doesn't like ordinary
vibrations already, much less 40cm+ displacement in a fraction of a second.

Heavy servers and especially UPS battery rows would likely take the whole rack
down/toppling over with them. Plus: most cabling is secured to the
walls/floors with not very much slack, which means a LOT of damaged/torn
cables and FUBAR'd ports.

All in all, if an earthquake of the scale in the video would hit a typical
European DC, it's bye-bye and rebuild.

~~~
dmix
Forgive my uninformed question but I remember seeing a video many years ago
where a (Samsung?) hard-drive had built-in protection from being dropped. The
disk will stop spinning within a millisecond when it detects movement. They
could survive a sudden drop onto a floor. I assumed this was a common feature
of modern disk based hard-drives.

Could built-in protections like this in harddrives be a sufficient protection
in an earthquake? What other moving parts are that at risk here? Assuming the
servers themselves are locked in cages, I wouldn't expect them to crash to the
floor.

Although the big difference here is it's not a sudden drop but a prolonged
forceful shaking.

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rzzzt
Sudden motion detection [1] is built into many notebooks, and also allows you
to use your MacBook as a lightsaber.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_Motion_Sensor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_Motion_Sensor)

~~~
i336_
And thinkpads.

I used it to add X11 autorotation to an X61 tablet. No spin animation, but it
was a cool one-day hack nonetheless.

The fun part was that the orientation analyses was done from a shell script,
and actually worked 100% of the time (unlike so many phones)! \o/

The insane part was that DRM/KMS on Linux is 1000% crazy and I had to patch
the kernel to stop poking the backlight on every. rotation. event, grr. (I had
to do it in the kernel - I basically killed DPMS - because X11 libdrm is
utterly incomprehensible.)

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rjbwork
Poor sysadmins! They have to wear full 3 pieces suits on the DC Floor!

Besides that, the video/tech is really cool.

~~~
hvidgaard
At least it's a nice cool temperature.

~~~
robinson-wall
Depends which aisle you're in :)

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laurentl
I visited a couple of DCs in Tokyo, and the tours systematically feature a
look at the anti-seismic system. It's actually pretty unimpressive : basically
the seismic-protected part of the building is mounted on big rubber dampers,
with some huge pistons thrown in for active attenuation. In taller buildings
(I visited a DC with around 20 stories IIRC) the stories are not rigidly
connected together, so that instead of swaying (and possibly toppling) during
an earthquake, the building just kind of wobbles.

Very effective though, as the video shows. My visits were post-2011, and each
DC had a record of the building's movement during the big earthquake; max
amplitude on the seismic-protected part was a couple of centimeters, vs 50 cms
or more for the rest of the building.

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cryptonector
Unimpressive?!

Well, I am quite impressed.

~~~
laurentl
Just to clarify: I meant that the equipment itself is unimpressive (mundane
would be a better term I guess) but the results are definitely impressive :D

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i336_
Any video editors got a few minutes?

There's an open video stabilization request here:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ImageStabilization/comments/6e1mgj/...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ImageStabilization/comments/6e1mgj/request_stabilize_on_the_computer_servers_that/)

So far there's [https://streamable.com/lrkhg](https://streamable.com/lrkhg)
which sorta gets partway there.

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cryptonector
I've been in a datacenter in Tokyo where the floors were not seismically
isolated, but the rack cabinets were made to sway. It's hard to tell many
floors up that an earthquake is in progress, but you can _see_ it when you see
the racks swaying!

~~~
redm
I visited the Dreamworks DC in SOCAL back in 2005 and they had per rack
isolation plates as you remember. They also had a 25' long tape drive on one
huge isolation plate. Those plates basically are on a central piston and
rotate in a circular pattern. Seems a lot cheaper than proofing the entire
floor.

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saalweachter
I wonder if it is disorienting standing or walking on the movement isolating
floor.

There's a (thought?) experiment you can do where you put someone inside a fake
room built like an overturned box, and then jerk the walls in a random
direction while the floor stay still. You get disoriented and fall over. Or
the more common experience where you're on a stopped train and the train next
to you starts to move, and it takes you a minute to figure out which of you is
actually moving.

I'd have to imagine standing on the isolated floor while the rest of the
building moves would be similarly confusing.

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hinkley
The guys in that video look to me like they are experiencing some vertigo from
the room shifting. They keep grabbing things to steady themselves.

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ChuckMcM
Category "Auto and Vehicles" ? It is interesting to note that the people on
the seismically isolated floor are not swaying with the video (it is explained
that the camera is mounted to the non-isolated part of the building so it
appears the server room floor is moving when instead it is the building that
is moving).

Most of the data centers I've looked at in the Bay Area just bolt the racks to
the floor and are done with it assuming, I presume, that it is the shifting on
the floor that damages the hardware.

~~~
hinkley
Probably more an issue of shifting racks damaging the employees. Bolt those
puppies down and nobody gets crushed to death.

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johnflan
That earthquake goes on for way longer than I would have expected.

~~~
russdill
The duration and intensity of an Earthquake are strongly correlated. You can
even use it to estimate how strong a quake is and how far away you might be.

The Sendai earthquake in 2011 was 6 minutes long. There's a story which I now
cannot find about a seismic conference being held in Japan some distance from
the epicenter. They felt only moderate shaking, but were immediately aware of
the severity of the quake due to the duration.

~~~
wlesieutre
Relevant portion starts right at the top:
[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-
big-...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one)

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vzaliva
What is amazing is how cool are the people in the video. Instead of running
out screaming they calmly do their job.

~~~
hinkley
There are an astoundingly high number of quakes in Japan that are strong
enough that you can feel. When I was in Tokyo years ago, I felt one every four
weeks on average.

You quickly come to a different relationship with the world when it refuses to
stay still that often.

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sengork
Commercial racks and datacenter products have optional features that can be
utilised in earthquake prone environments. What you see in the video is not
only those rack features but also structure of the building itself (both are
important and neither one is sufficient for certain areas).

For example see:
[https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/STXN8P/com.ibm.s...](https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/STXN8P/com.ibm.storage.ssic.help.doc/f2c_prepearthqkitraised_30yyzi.html)

Without employing these techniques, you'd get something similar to this:
[https://i.imgur.com/Sb2M5Qo.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/Sb2M5Qo.jpg)

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guscost
Can a multimedia person make the video fixed on the servers instead?

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eternalban
Related: [https://www.curbed.com/2011/3/15/10477706/japan-benefits-
fro...](https://www.curbed.com/2011/3/15/10477706/japan-benefits-from-wrights-
lessons-on-earthquake-preparedness)

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pavement
I guess a similar level of movement isolation would probably be required for
all those repurposed oil rigs and maritime-oriented machine rooms that
anticipate taking advatage of sea water as server coolant.

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factsaresacred
"Techno Mind Corporation".

Think I saw them play in Berlin once.

