‘Project Storm’ shows importance of disaster planning

Storm management plans have been an important part of data center planning for years, and tech giant Facebook has had a strong hand in them with its "Project Storm" initiative. Earlier this month, some companies were concerned over the gathering development of Hurricane Matthew, but previous projects may have had an impact on how businesses think of preparation.

As the name suggests, Project Storm is a testing scenario used to prepare for possible data center outages, as would happen during a storm or natural disaster. According to IEEE Spectrum, the program dates back to Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which posed a major threat to the company's operations.

Since then, the initiative has used simulated "takedowns" to attack the networks and help the company prepare for a real-world crisis. For a business, the prospect of deliberately disrupting performance could seem scary, but if it leads to better power outage protection, such tests could ultimately be worth the risk.

Speaking to Forbes in September, Jay Parikh, Facebook's vice president of engineering, explained the impact of the "real drills" the company used to demonstrate the danger of a major disaster.

"We did lots and lots of mini-drills in the oneish years before we did finally pull the plug on the network," he said. "There was a bunch of stuff that broke. But because we had built in tooling and collection and understanding of the metrics, people using Facebook didn't notice. It largely was a pretty boring event for us."

Factor in a smart backup system to your company's storm response plans and you could have an easier time negotiating stressful situations. Our product list contains numerous systems to help you, including the BG500 model. See more of our Back-UPS Pro offerings here!