Heavy rains in Henan Province caused power outages in data centers and paralyzed many websites. How important is disaster recovery?

The flood situation in Henan has touched the hearts of people across the country.

The heavy rain caused huge property losses to the people of the province and even threatened their lives.

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Things are not peaceful in the virtual world either.

Heavy rains caused power outages in many computer rooms and data centers, paralyzing many websites.

On the evening of the 20th, Jinjiang Literature published a statement saying that the off-site backbone computer room where the main website business of Jinjiang Literature City is located is in Zhengzhou City. The computer room suffered a power outage due to heavy rain, causing some lines to become unstable and even unable to open web pages.

360 Bidding issued an announcement that due to heavy rain in Henan, the computer room failed and some reports could not be queried.

Service providers such as Western Digital and Jingan Networks all experienced power outages in their computer rooms in Zhengzhou and were forced to use diesel generators for power supply.

Heavy rains dealt a heavy blow to Henan's Internet infrastructure.

When it comes to natural disasters and data centers, we have to mention disaster recovery systems.

For large information systems, disasters do not only refer to natural disasters, but also include various human factors. In order to resist these risks, the concept of disaster recovery came into being.

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The term disaster recovery originated in the United States in the 1970s, when SunGard, a famous software and IT service company, built the world's first disaster recovery center. The chairman of the company once said a famous saying: "Within 4 hours of any computer accident, our backup can get your service back online and run smoothly for 210 days."

Although there were some pioneers, the development of disaster recovery systems was still very slow. Its rapid development was due to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

In 2001, the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred in the United States. Nearly 3,000 Americans were killed in the attacks. At the same time, the companies in the World Trade Center were not having an easy time either.

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Almost all small and medium-sized enterprises in the World Trade Center went bankrupt. Due to the lack of disaster recovery systems and effective emergency measures, the Bank of New York had to go bankrupt and liquidate a few months later due to the complete destruction of its data center and interruption of its communication lines.

In contrast, Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley, which have comprehensive disaster recovery systems, resumed all operations in a very short time.

After the disaster, Deutsche Bank mobilized more than 4,000 employees and resources from its global branches to resume business operations in a very short time.

Morgan Stanley's office on the 25th floor of the World Trade Center was completely destroyed, but a second office was established in the disaster recovery center within half an hour, and all operations were restored the next day.

The 911 incident made all companies understand the importance of disaster recovery.

With the advent of the information age, network attacks, hardware damage, system paralysis, and internal employee database deletion incidents occur frequently. Natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes have caused data centers to be paralyzed and even data loss to occur from time to time.

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• In 2000, eight major websites in the United States suffered DDoS attacks, some of which were paralyzed for three days, causing economic losses of approximately US$1.2 billion.
• In 2009, Taipei Taoyuan Airport was down for 36 hours due to damage to the airport's EMC system hard drive.
• In 2013, the London Stock Exchange was suspended for nearly seven hours due to a computer system failure.

Disaster recovery has become a measure of a company's ability to combat risks from a technical perspective. Nowadays, Internet companies, big and small, all have their own disaster recovery systems or solutions to a greater or lesser extent.

Disaster recovery systems are divided into three levels:

Data-level disaster recovery

Data-level disaster recovery focuses on data. When a disaster occurs, how can data be protected from being destroyed? In the early days, data-level disaster recovery was accomplished by transporting hard disks by truck. Now, it is mainly accomplished by synchronizing data between data centers using ultra-large-capacity optical fibers.

Application-level disaster recovery

Application-level disaster recovery focuses on whether the application can be continued. Usually, a complete set of support systems will be backed up in an off-site disaster recovery center to ensure that when problems occur in the main production center, the production center can be switched immediately to shorten the system downtime.

Business-level disaster recovery

Business-level disaster recovery is generally considered to be the highest level of disaster recovery solution, which not only requires backing up all codes, but also includes offline rules and regulations as well as personnel composition.

The flood in Henan Province paralyzed many websites, but most of them were back online in a very short time, which was obviously due to the disaster recovery system.

However, since the affected websites do not undertake financial business, the data center level may be relatively low and be more affected by the flood. Data centers that undertake financial business can withstand general natural disasters and the impact may not be that great.