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 on 10 hours exclusively to back up the data of the center, which were a few miles 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 rolls, and released at high speed with nozzles evenly dispersed in the data center. According to people who are well aware of the system, pressure on the ING Bank datacenter was higher than expected, and produced a loud sound when the gas was quickly released through microscopic holes in the nozzles (think the noise made by a steam engine) .
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.
Little is known about how sound can damage a hard drive. One of the first related experiments was done by engineer Brendan Gregg, 2008, while working for the Sun's Fishworks team. He posted a video explaining how shouting in a data center can drive hard drives to malfunction. Watch this video 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.
