Reports of sustained uptime in Japan continue
No major data center outages reported following disaster
Published 18th March, 2011 by Yevgeniy Sverdlik
Many data center companies in Japan continued reporting throughout the week following a devastating earthquake and tsunami off Japan’s northeastern coast that their data centers continued normal operations. Ample fuel had been secured for many facilities’ backup generators to address rolling blackouts implemented by energy providers.
Jiro Fukuda of the Japan Data Center Council wrote in an email to DatacenterDynamics that there had not been any reports of major damage to data centers as of 17 March. “The Internet and other network services are being provided as usual,” he wrote.
“The discussion about the maintenance of long-term service continuance has already started [among] data center service providers,” Fukuda added.
JDDC is a data center industry consortium, consisting of representatives from the private sector, academia and the government.
Data center services provider Telehouse released a statement on 17 March, saying all 21 of its data centers in Japan were operational, including one in Sendai – the area most severely affected by the disaster.
The company said the data centers will stay operational throughout periodic three-hour rolling black-outs that have been implemented by Tohoku-Electric Power and Tokyo Electric Power.
“All facilities have a minimum 24-hour fuel supply plus regularly scheduled refueling (natural gas and/or diesel) and are expected to continue normal operations,” a Telehouse statement read.
HP and IBM, two large multinationals that act as both IT vendors and providers of data center services, also said their data centers continued normal operations.
HP CEO Leo Apotheker said during a press conference in San Francisco on 14 March that the company’s infrastructure in Japan “has not been really touched.”
IBM Japan spokesman Kazuhiro Kaneko wrote in an email to DatacenterDynamics on 15 March that “all IBM data centers have been working normally even just after the earthquake, and we keep delivering our services to the clients.”
Some services provided by the telecom Internet Initiative Japan were partly unavailable because of service disruptions experienced by some access-network carriers. IIJ said on 17 March that its own infrastructure continued operating as usual.
“IIJ's backbone network and service facilities are operating without disruption,” the company said.
IIJ services that were partially unavailable because of access-network carriers’ problems were Wide Area Network, Line management, FiberAccess, DSL and Mobile services.
Some of the company’s managed services, including security services, were affected by a “chaotic distribution channel”, delaying deliveries of network equipment.
Services affected by delivery disruptions include mobile, managed router, Internet-LAN, managed VPN Pro, managed firewall, IIJ DDoS and network intrusion detection, among others.
Delays in arrival of network-support staff could also play an effect on service availability, IIJ said.
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