DataGenter of ING Bank in Bucharest in Romania suffered serious damage during the weekend when a firefighting test was carried out. It seems that the loud sound of the inert extinguishing gas released has destroyed dozens of hard drives.
The bank's website was offline and the bank relied for 10 hours solely on copies data security of the center, which was located a few kilometers away.
The bank wanted to test its firefighting system datacenter but although it worked flawlessly there were collateral losses. Firefighting of the data center is based on an inert gas capable of cutting oxygen off the fire and extinguishing it while not damaging computer components.
The gas is stored in cylinders, and released at high speed through nozzles that are evenly dispersed throughout the data center. According to people familiar with the system, the pressure in the ING Bank data center was higher than expected, and it produced a loud sound when the gas was rapidly released through tiny nozzle holes (think of the noise a steammachine).
The bank said that the sound produced was very strong and is estimated to have touched 130dB (sound as much as an airplane engine). Sound means vibration, and this caused damage to hard drives. HDDs began to vibrate, vibration was transmitted to the read / write heads, causing them to erase traces of data.
There is little knowledge of how sound can damage a hard drive. One of the first related experiments was done by engineer Brendan Gregg in 2008 while working for Sun's Fishworks team. He made a video explaining how yelling in a data center can put hard drives in harm's waymode. Check out the video in question below:
The company Siemens has also published an essay a year ago with tests that showed that "too much noise can have a negative effect on hard disk performance". The researchers said this negative impact could start as low as 110dB.
Finally, the ING bank in Bucharest took 10 hours to re-launch due to the size and complexity of the damage.
