At least, that’s the observation GigaOm’s Barb Darrow recently made of a Digital Realty survey of managers’ data center plans. “Despite the angst that superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Irene caused data center providers and their customers in the New York metro area over the last two years, businesses still want to expand their data center capacity in that low-lying, suddenly storm-surge-prone area,” she writes.

Apparently the familiar is more comfortable than the unknown. According to the survey, two-thirds of respondents would rather see the data center in the city where they work, and target locations, other than New York were Los Angeles (earthquakes and fires), Dallas (tornadoes), Chicago (blizzards), the San Francisco Bay Area (earthquakes again), and Phoenix.

“Of course, when two 100-year storms hit the same area within two years of each other, you might start evaluating new locations,” Darrow writes. “Then the question becomes what areas are not susceptible to natural disasters,” echoing what she wrote at the end of last year about Fidelity Investments setting up a data center in the far-from-water, far-from-earthquakes, yet tornado-prone Omaha, Neb.

And recall that last June, just a little ol’ thunderstorm took out Amazon Web Services.

The most important reasons given for data center expansion, Digital Realty notes, are (in order of priority) the need for increased security, energy efficiency, new applications/services, and more space. It isn’t clear whether “Not Being Under Water,” “Not Being on Fire,” or other variations on “Not Being Destroyed” were choices. (To be fair, when respondents were asked to provide multiple reasons for expanding data centers, “disaster recovery/Sarbanes-Oxley” came in second after “security.”)

The other interesting factor that cropped up was the data sovereignty issue. As you may recall, this is becoming more of a thing as an increasing number of countries, including the U.S., claim some degree of access to data stored on their shores, regardless of the data’s country of origin or the residence of the company that owns it.

“Geopolitical location of data” was extremely important to 50 percent of respondees, though it was slightly beaten out by data authenticity and security, physical security, control over the facility, and the total cost of the technology. “The two factors in data sovereignty (data authenticity/security and geopolitical/legal location) are the most important considerations for 29% of the respondents,” Digital Realty noted.

Physical security — that is, Not Being Underwater, Not Being on Fire, and Not Being Destroyed — was apparently a consideration for only 14 percent of respondees.

Last summer, the data center at the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico was surrounded on two sides by a 60,000-acre fire, while in 2007, the data center at Pepperdine University was threatened by a 1,200-acre fire in Malibu, Calif., that came within 100 feet of it.

More recently, we’ve had the fires in Colorado, which led one data center manager to post to Slashdot asking for advice. While there were the usual number of jokes, tangents, and speculation about his motives, there was also useful advice for data center managers as fire season approaches. (And most of this advice is useful for disasters in general.)

• Have a disaster recovery plan and make sure it’s updated — for example, are all the contacts and their phone numbers correct? “DR plans are a living document that should be updated for every significant change to your infrastructure,” noted Slashdot user Macgrrl. “They should have an annual ‘trial run’ to see if they work. The worst time to find out your DR plan doesn’t work is in an actual disaster event.”
• Priorities are people, data, equipment.
• This is one advantage of using the cloud — data is by definition offsite.
• Perform regular offsite backups.
• Make sure the network is documented and up-to-date, with the documentation available electronically and offsite. Save configuration settings to a text file and store it both electronically and on paper.
• Label everything — including AC adapters to keep from zapping things afterwards.
• Take pictures of the cabling for documentation purposes.
• If you have to save equipment, focus on disk drives and servers first. And keep in mind that insurance that reimburses for equipment lost in a fire might not reimburse for equipment damaged in a bugout.
• To save time, use wire cutters to disconnect cables (*not* power cables!).
• Cover things you’ve left behind with plastic or trash bags to help protect them from water and smoke.
• Consider setting up your data center to be portable in the first place — set it up in a shipping container, put racks on wheels (and make sure doors are wide enough to move them through and you have a forklift if necessary), use quick-disconnect hard drive enclosures, buy a truck or van to store onsite, etc.

“Any disaster plan should be able to cope with ‘and then a giant foot appeared above the building and squished it flat,’” noted Slashdot user GirlInTraining. “Yours should be no different. It might not be a wild fire that threatens your servers… it could be a UPS that shorts out, or a tornado, flood, a failed fire suppression unit, or simple human incompetence.”