The cloud model and the rise of datacentres took a surprise kicking as a result of the New York hurricane.

Lower Manhattan had shedloads of data centres which suddenly found themselves without power and flooded. When the storm hit the local power utility ConEd began proactively shutting off power to parts of lower Manhattan, in an attempt to remove the load from the energy grid.

Data centres were ready for this sort of thing and shifted to backup power as a result. But their generators were housed in the basement and when these flooded because of the storm water they were knocked out.   This meant that the data centre operators had to haul in extra generators from outside and keeping these running with enough fuel is creating a few headaches.

While many of the data centres involved were for web hosting, the disaster has made more than a few wonder if taking their data off site is a good idea after all.