Silence Please!

DataSince 2008, the fire safety industry had received reports claiming that disk drives and IT hardware faced serious damage when gaseous fire extinguishing systems were activated. High security IT storage and data centres typically utilise gaseous extinguishing systems to protect business-critical hardware, software and data in the event of a fire. The fire protection systems extinguish the fire by flooding the environment with naturally occurring inert gases or chemical agents, minimising the damage from heat and smoke. Servers and hard disks may suffer some physical damage from heat and smoke but why had widespread damage occurred, in some cases, in the absence of a fire?

Operations came to a halt at WestHost, a major webhosting provider in the USA, when they suffered a catastrophic failure that took down almost 100,000 websites and email accounts for up to six days. Whilst undergoing the routine testing of the data centre’s fire protection system, hundreds of disk-storage systems were severely damaged. Customer data backed up on virtual tape, stored on disk systems located in the data centre was also damaged and some data irretrievably lost. The widespread damage was totally unexpected – in the absence of a fire – it was a mystery.
A number of other companies had experienced incidents resulting in damage to servers, data stores, cloud and utility services resulting in costly hardware repair and database recovery.

Recognising the severity of the situation, the Siemens Building Technologies Research and Development team decided to carry out a detailed investigation and laboratory tests, the findings of which determined that it was the noise associated with the release of the gas that was damaging the disks or causing data transfer interruption. When a gaseous fire suppression system is triggered, there is a loud and sustained noise during the release of the gas. This can reach noise levels of 130 dB – equivalent to standing 50 feet from a fighter jet taking off!

The Siemens research team subjected hard disk drives (HDDs) to equivalent noise levels and found that the performance of the drives was reduced by up to 50% causing temporary malfunction, reduction/loss in rate of data transfer or loss of data . These findings are of great concern for the global IT industry with new technology HDDs proving increasingly susceptible to the sound energy associated with an extinguishing system discharge.
Fortunately, Siemens’ research has resulted in the development of the Sinorix Silent Nozzle which reduces noise during extinguishing, to about 1/100th that of conventional nozzles, and shifts the sound frequency away from the crucial spectrum to which HDD devices are sensitive. Efficient distribution of the extinguishing agent is unaffected. Fast, reliable and cost-effective, the nozzle can be installed as part of a new extinguishing system or easily retrofitted to an existing system in a matter of hours, without any disruption to daily business operations.