What to expect after a cooling failure

Wed Jul 10 05:47:20 UTC 2013

On Tue, 9 Jul 2013, Erik Levinson wrote:

> For those who have gone through such events in the past, what can one 
> expect in terms of long-term impact...should we expect some premature 
> component failures? Does anyone have any stats to share?

I have experience with a different kind of event that might be of interest 
to a wider audience.

When the fire suppression system went off in a site, we had a lot of 
instant harddrive failures. I don't have any numbers, but let's say 5-10% 
of all hdd:s in the room died more or less instantly. Supposedly this was 
because of the air pressure shock when the inert fire suppression gas was 
released and the vents weren't big enough to release the overpressurised 
air outside.

I did some research and there are forum posts etc about these kinds of 
events happening in other places.

So, takeaway from this was RAID is an uptime tool, not a substitute for 
backups, and also, get a qualified ventilation/fire supression systems 
engineer to inspect your sites from this aspect.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se