The bank said the sound of inert gas being emitted during the fire drill at ING’s primary data centre in Bucharest, Romania had a “severe” effect on servers and storage equipment.
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In 2013, the French media reported that accountancy software used by the country’s government had become temporarily unavailable after a fire protection system had been accidentally triggered at a data centre, causing a loud noise.
Daniel Llano, Head of ING Retail Banking, said on the company’s site: “I activated emergency procedures and recovery plans provided for such situations”.
In addition to damage to the storage devices, card transactions, ATM withdrawals, internet banking, internal email, and the bank’s website were also affected for local customers. “But because of the magnitude and complexity of breakdowns, unfortunately, the time required to restore activity by the back-up was longer than the tests we perform regularly”. Inergen gas also does not decrease the overall temperature within the data centre in the same way as other fire suppression systems.
The bank says that services were knocked out for around 10 hours thanks to the damage caused when it tested its extinguisher system, which expels a mix of nitrogen, argon and carbon dioxide, known as inergen.
Llano went on to say that the bank is monitoring developments with its suppliers.
However, according to Motherboard, on this occasion, the high-pressure release of the gas produced a loud noise – over 130 decibels – and the associated vibration destroyed dozens of hard drives.
Inergen is a kind of fire extinguishing system which relies on gas rather than traditional foam or liquid.
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“The hypothesis is that sound causes vibrations in the HDD case that are ultimately transmitted to the disk spindle and head assembly, causing misalignment of the read/write heads to the data tracks”, it said.
