Recent announcements by earthquake scientists and the US Geological Survey indicate that Southern California is due for a major earthquake in the next 30 years. That along with other data suggests that there’s as much as a 30-50% chance of major shaking affecting the UCI campus in the next 10 years.

NACS has studied the likely effect of such a quake on central computing systems and data stores in our Engineering Gateway Academic Data Center (ADC). Aside from the obvious scenarios, like computer racks falling over or the raised floor collapsing under the strain of holding two very large UPSes, we discovered that disk drives housing critical campus data (e.g., our campus e-mail services) are susceptible to damage in such an event and possibly in a milder quake.

To mitigate the risk of serious data loss, NACS has followed the lead of the UCSD ADC and purchased and installed ‘Isobase’ rack isolation equipment. This equipment was installed during the June 24th scheduled service outage. Similar to base isolation technology used on modern high rise and freeway overpasses, ‘Isobase’ places computer racks on essentially a shock-absorber surface. Six racks which house NACS’s e-mail, calendaring, EEE, and other critical campus services were installed on this base. We plan to purchase bases for our remaining systems in the ADC as funds become available.

If you have any interest in this equipment or what steps you can take to protect computers and disks from seismic events please contact NACS. NACS also has a service for hosting your equipment in our ADC.