Last week, data center staff at the hosting firm Involta in Cedar Rapids, Iowa struggled to keep services online, according to an article in The Gazette. Involta’s chief marketing officer, Rob Smith said the company brought in a generator from Peoria on Thursday morning that was the size of a semi truck. But by that time, the water was higher than the switch connection points on the building. Instead, the company switched to eight small generators and had people running five-gallon cans of gasoline through the building to keep the generators running.

Photo by firskey.

Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge has posted some flood related links, including Iowa blogger John Rath’s report and a feature in Byte and Switch.