Loud noise takes ING Romania data center offline

ING Romania’s data center went offline last weekend after a fire drill. The storage systems were disturbed by the vibrations caused by the release of inert gases.

ING Romania held a fire drill in its data center on Saturday, but at 13.00 problems started to arise due to the emission of gases, the bank reports. The outage lasted until 11pm that day and customers were unable to transact or bank online. ING Romania switched to its backup data center and says the problems took longer to resolve than expected ‘due to the size and complexity of the outages’.

During the fire drill, ING tested the extinguishing system, which in server rooms is often based on the emission of inert gases, usually nitrogen and argon. The gases lower the oxygen level, which extinguishes the fire. These types of systems do not damage the equipment or cause large temperature drops. A side effect, however, is that the gases are expelled under such high pressure through small holes in the storage cylinders that a lot of noise can be released.

According to Motherboard, the noise level at ING Romania reached 130 decibels. “It was as high as our measuring equipment could register,” said one employee. The vibrations caused by the sound affected the hard drives: the vibrations from the actuators caused the read and write heads to deviate from the tracks. Motherboard refers to a paper from IBM, which states that a small deviation of the heads due to vibrations from the sound of the gas exhaust causes the reading and writing to stop.