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https://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-loud-sound-just-shut-down-a-banks-data-center-for-10-hours
ING Bank's main data center in Bucharest, Romania, was severely damaged over the weekend during a fire extinguishing test. In what is a very rare but known phenomenon, it was the loud sound of inert gas being released that destroyed dozens of hard drives. The site is currently offline and the bank relies solely on its backup data center, located within a couple of miles' proximity.
"The drill went as designed, but we had collateral damage", ING's spokeswoman in Romania told me, confirming the inert gas issue. Local clients were unable to use debit cards and to perform online banking operations on Saturday between 1PM and 11PM because of the test. "Our team is investigating the incident," she said.
The purpose of the drill was to see how the data center's fire suppression system worked. Data centers typically rely on inert gas to protect the equipment in the event of a fire, as the substance does not chemically damage electronics, and the gas only slightly decreases the temperature within the data center.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Monday September 12 2016, @07:37PM
a properly designed system should be killing humans if it's doing its job.
Rather pessimistic. Assuming good mixing you'll get high as a kite via the usual solvent inhalant effect when its pretty effective at stopping fire (a couple percent)
Of course you don't set a system off for fun, usually, implying there's a killer fire, so you get the heck out because of the fire not necessarily the halon or halon replacement.
A good engineering rule of thumb is half the atmosphere is below 18kft and 18kft mountains or aircraft flying is no laughing matter for random sick civilians but its hardly guaranteed death and that's 50% depletion of O2 via 50% halon in the air.
Probably 5% or so in the air might put out a fire if in some miracle it were perfectly mixed, 10% or so will make you high as a kite and lay down and die in the fire (I mean, there is a fire, after all), and nobody spends enough money to put way more than 50% in the air. I mean, even before it was banned, it wasn't cheap.
Like I wrote I've worked at sites that had a halon dump, nobody dies although I heard its utterly terrifying and the mess was impressive.
Of course, 50% of O2 displaced from air can't kill healthy hiker me, but if I huffed lungfulls of smoke to cause smoke inhalation problems (because you're doing a halon dump because of the fire...) then maybe 50% halon could kill a no longer healthy dude. Like 50:50 halon and plastic smoke probably wouldn't be good for you even if 50:50 halon and air would be fine. Then again at 50% plastic smoke intake you're probably dead already. Hmm.