Stories from the Data Centre
56 disks simultaneously died
Can you send me 56 spare NetApp disks in a few hours?
An early sunday morning: until the phone rings.
The local firebrigade called to notice us the fire extinguishing system in one of our datacenters was activated…
The Call:
Hey, we forcely opened the door to your datacenter: there was a fire alarm
The Verdict:
Our fire extinghuising system broke the storage system!
Your disks are at risk!
Case Study – how does a Fire extinguisher demolish hard disks?
Inert Gas Data Centre Fire Protection can damage hard disks. We discovered the problem is not uncommon, We found more reports about Inert Gas Fire Suppression causing havoc on drives.
The problem has nothing to with pressure, temperature or chemical reactions.
The Case:
A Gas Fire Suppression system broke many of our hard disks.
The Findings:
More data centres suffre from a chepa build Fire Extinguisher System: more disks died.
Quiet Please! Noise slows your storage down
Hard Disks are becoming increasingly sensitive to noise.
Excessive noise will damage modern drives, see my other blogs about inert gas damaging hard drives.
But not only excessive noise from a fire extinguishing wil impact your hard disks.
Any louder noise is hurting performance of modern rotating spindle disks.
Fun fact:
Shouting to your storage will slow things down!