Loud sound of the fire extinguishing system knocked out the drives in the Nasdaq data center

In the Swedish data center Digiplex, which is used by Nasdaq for operations in Northern Europe, in mid-April there was a serious failure. Failed hard drives of many servers. The reason was the incorrectly configured fire extinguishing system - it made an extremely loud sound during operation, which resulted in damage to the disks.

What happened

Traditionally, data centers and technical premises use fire extinguishing systems using inert gas - this allows you to extinguish a fire without damaging the equipment with water or foam. However, if the system is incorrectly adjusted, its operation may be accompanied by an extremely loud sound that occurs when the gas exits the cylinders. And such sounds can disable hard drives, which is what happened in the Digiplex data center.
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As it was found out by the publication Bleeping Computer, the extinguishing system worked accidentally, there was no fire in reality. As a result of the incident, the Nasdaq servers, as well as Scandinavian banks FIM Bank and OP Bank Group, failed.

The idle time as a result of the failure was about five hours - after that, the engineers of the Nasdaq Nordic launched a backup system. At the same time, a company representative said that there would be “not enough servers in all of Sweden” to replace all the failed equipment, and it would have to be imported from other countries.

Not the first problems because of the loud sound in the data center

Incidents like the crash in the Nasdaq data center have happened before. For example, in September 2016, a loud sound of the fire extinguishing system for ten hours knocked out the data center of the Romanian ING Bank.

The negative impact of loud sounds on the work of hard drives is confirmed by various studies. For example, experiments by experts at IBM have confirmed the fact that in some cases the operation of inert gas extinguishing systems can lead to similar problems.

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