Hurricane Sandy Recap

It’s been an eventful few days up here in Connecticut. Hurricane Sandy packed quite a punch to our state. At its peak, we had over 500,000 power outages, many trees down, and the coastline experienced the worst flooding anyone has ever seen.

Thankfully, all of us at LexiConn fared quite well. Sixty percent of us lost power to our homes, one employee had some minor roof damage, but overall, no serious issues.

Currently, only one employee still doesn’t have power to his home.

Since all of our servers are located in Chicago, no issues were encountered with our infrastructure for our clients. However, our support office here in Connecticut lost power on Monday. Power was restored on Wednesday morning. The only impact was no phone support for two days.

We all worked remotely from wherever we could get power and an internet connection on Monday and Tuesday, and we were able to keep things relatively normal in terms of support and day to day operations. Our emergency plan worked as we planned, helped in part by the hurricane and blizzard last year. We were more prepared this time around.

Other datacenters in Connecticut and New York did not fare as well. Many had flooded basements where their diesel generator fuel supplies were located. This meant no diesel fuel for their generators, so many facilities lost power. A few datacenters in flooded portions of NYC were manually carrying 25 gallon drums of diesel fuel up 10+ flights of stairs throughout the day to fill day tanks to keep their generators running. Others brought in temporary generators and hand pumps.

Here at LexiConn, we’re all very thankful that the impact to us and our families was minimal. Thousands of other people in the state were severely impacted, and continue to try to recover from the storm and historic flooding.

Thanks for all the well wishes and concern many of you have sent our way during this storm. It was greatly appreciated.

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4 Comments

  1. Scott Moore says:

    Glad to know you are all o.k. Up until now, I had forgotten you were in CT. We’ve been continually updating our site and have never experienced any slowness or downtime.

    We wish you all the very best!

  2. Jason K says:

    It is good that your employees are ok.

    What prompted your company to host exclusively in Chicago? Is it a very stable environment regarding storms and other disruptions? I would have thought that the jet stream and coldness could potentially be an issue for up time?

    I am considering using hosts in different cities, just in case of emergency issues like Sandy. But of course that increases admin and general costs, unless you can have servers with third parties that provide back ups in different cities as part of their regular plan?

    • Yes, Chicago is one of the most stable cities to host in. They are not prone to any natural disasters (besides snow which they are well equipped to handle), have tons of bandwidth and backbone providers, and are centrally located for great performance to both coasts.

      Geolocating in multiple locations can be tricky, as you’ll either need to sync your data (can be expensive and complicated), or maintain a semi-synced backup that you can switch to if your primary locations goes offline.

      We back up all of our client data to a different datacenter in Texas each day, and these backups can be used for disaster recovery.

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