Take Google, for instance. A lightning strike hit one of its centers in Belgium in recent days. The company said data had been erased from some of its disks after lightning hit one of its data centers not once, not even twice (it never strikes the same place twice, right?), but four times.
The affected center is linked to Google’s Compute Engine cloud service, which undertakes computing operations for business customers, so fear not – all your Google Drive, YouTube, and Gmail files have not been frazzled.
In fact, CNN reported that while data on a number of disks has been permanently lost, that data was still recoverable from back-ups on other servers (that’s right, folks, always back up your data!).
And even then, the data affected by the lightning strike amounted to a mere 0.000001 percent of its Western Europe disk space, so if your business was caught up in the incident then you were very, very unlucky.
Google said it has an “ongoing program” aimed at improving the durability of its storage hardware to deal with such incidents. While the event is a clear reminder of the kinds of challenges that face cloud computing operations, it’s certainly reassuring to know Google was able to deal with the damage and restore all lost data for the affected businesses.
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