As the direct human cost of the huge earthquake and tsunami in Japan is measured and widely reported, massive infrastructure damage is also apparent, and extends to utilities and and less critical but important public and private services.
Beyond essential services such as energy and drinking water, there are early reports from dozens of data centers and cloud service providers connected to corporations such as Salesforce, Yahoo! and Amazon.
Nationwide, Japan is home to a large data center industry, and a cloud services industry that
According to continual updates from Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication (
An Amazon cloud facility that had opened recently had experienced no issues as of last Friday, according its site. IDC Frontier, which counts Yahoo! as a customer, had reported no problems in its nine data centers in the region, according to the online reports.
The Japan Data Center Council has a standardized approach for members to follow in constructing data centers to deal with earthquakes (
The U.S. Department of Interior’s
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