Most importantly, 75 Broad just flooded; pretty soon they'll lose 55 Broad, 25 Broad, 60 Hudson, and potentially 111 8th. The problem is the generators are not on particularly high floors, and people only keep certain amounts of fuel (<24h, often around 8h), and even with "guaranteed refueling contracts", a lot of people won't be getting diesel in time.
(EDIT: these are the main carrier hotels and colocation facilities in the Northeast, all in Manhattan.)
I was wondering, if you happen to know, why there are so many colos in NYC / Manhattan? In general wouldn't you locate a server farm somewhere with cheap land / electricity / cooling? What advantage do they get from being there?
They're not really server colos (except for some wall street stuff, but even that is in Northern NJ now). The Manhattan facilities are mainly carrier interconnects between carriers and for equipment to provide leased circuits to businesses, a lot of which serve customers in Manhattan or grew up around telephone infrastructure to serve offices in Manhattan.
Big scale server colos are usually in WA/OR (cheap power), SFBA (fiber, tech companies), TX (cheap land, sort of cheap power, or at least available power), or DC metro (sort of cheap power, cheap land in some areas, lots of government users).
you're historically right about this, but wrong on a bunch of other levels. there is a few million square feet of real server colo in 111 8th ave, and at least an order of magnitude more than that combined across the other spaces mentioned.
The reason they locate there (as with in London) if to reduce the latency for financial trading programs. It may not sound like a lot, but when you have an automatic trading application processing billions of trades a year it can make a huge difference to receive the information a little earlier, and place your orders that little bit quicker.
As a side note, Internap's LGA11 datecentre facility on 75 Broad Street is currently being evacuated, and most of the fuel reserves are submerged below water...
The report I heard (at about 11PM EDT) was that the basement was flooded and the building was being evacuated, but servers would keep running for 5-7 hours until the back-up generators ran out of fuel.
IRC. (with people who lived out of colos in Lower Manhattan after 9/11, since if they left the area they wouldn't have been allowed back in -- living off vending machine food for a week or two reconfiguring equipment for themselves and other networks to account for the missing part of the city)
Also, woo, no more 111 8th. Building power is down for most of the building (all of it?) (per floor), although some of the areas have their own generators (Level(3) and the old AboveNet area)
(EDIT: these are the main carrier hotels and colocation facilities in the Northeast, all in Manhattan.)