'Powerful blast' at Glasgow City Council data centre prompts IT meltdown The catastrophic service outage at Glasgow City Council's data centre, caused after its IT systems servers were taken down by a fire suppressant accidentally going off, is continuing to cause widespread havoc for staff and the public. The embarrassing blunder was caused by a faulty air conditioning unit setting off its fire …
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I like how the picture on the article is a f****g kilt. Sod all to do with the story beyond the fact it's in Scotland, they couldn't even be arsed bringing out the Glaswegian stereotypes. Scotland = Shortbread Tin Highlander.
Anyway, it turns out that Sheffield Council are having some problems with their IT systems. Here's a picture of what that might look like. A spokesman said "Lor luv a duck, I know I'm not even the right faacking stereotype, but it's all daaaarn saaarf, innit! Root-te-toot, apples and pears, etc."
Pictures? ... fortunately the "banner" pics in all reg articles follow teh same URL pattern so its simple to use a custom AdBlock rule to hide them - been doing this since they arrived and can't say I've ever felt I'm missing anything. Also added another rule to hide those stupid "badges" and along with all the other stuff that gets blocked makes ElReg a much more pleasant read!
"I like how the picture on the article is a f****g kilt. Sod all to do with the story beyond the fact it's in Scotland, they couldn't even be arsed bringing out the Glaswegian stereotypes"
I agree completely...
This picture is far more appropriate to Glasgow and its people
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Sometimes they like to fuck up their filing systems and then spend a decade pursuing whoever pointed out the mistake in order to extract large sums of money, at the same time as they're breaching the data protection act and tossing around threats of arrest and imprisonment.
All because I pointed out that no, I'm not my dad, please correct your records...
Maintain roads. Schools. Social care. Pre-school education. Children's/Family services. Youth centers. Youth justice (eg. secure accomodation), street lighting, Social housing. Dealing with homelessness. Museums and galleries. Recreation areas (parks, leisure centres, sports facilities, playgrounds etc...), tourism information and promotion, libraries, cemetaries/cremation, trading standards and community safety, environmental health (food safety, pest control, pollution control), licensing (alcohol licensing, taxis, events), garbage collection, planning control, regeneration, fire services, coroners, registration of births, deaths and marriages, and election admin...
So yeah, what do they do for us hey?
Some clarification needed. Most IT kit is largely air by volume. And when the system goes off, presumably the air in the data centre has to be displaced to somewhere, otherwise the pressure must build up.
What kind of rate of pressure rise are we looking at? How is it vented?
Okay, imagine a room three metres wide, three metres long, three metres high.
That's nine cubic metres by my reckoning.
The room contains three cubic metres of kit. The fire company has calculated the quantity of FM-200 or whatever it is to fill the remaining six cubic metres. If you add more kit and the gas goes off, it's got to go somewhere. So either the roof pops off or the walls shift.
That's GCSE physics surely. That's my understanding as a humble data centre BOFH not a million miles from Glasgow, I'm not a gaseous fire suppression engineer.
P.S. The SNP will most likely blame "Westminster" and/or David Cameron. Still, we've got road signs in Gaelic, and that's really important.
Not quite sure what happened. And what do they mean by a faulty AC unit? Was it faulty as in going to catch fire!? If there's a VESDA (Very Early Smoke Detection Apparatus) system then that would be set off by the AC if it was producing prefire vapours (that's the whole point of VESDA) it detects "fires" before they turn in to fires! But normally you wouldn't want this to set off your suppression system, initially you'd want it to display an alarm on the fire panel so it could be investigated, not trigger the house alarm and discharge your gas! Or was it faulty and something happened like it produced a load of dust or something else that could also have been detect by the VESDA? This is why its important to remember to disconnect your suppression system BEFORE you let anyone in the DC to service kit etc! But whatever it shouldn't have set the gas off and the release of gas shouldn't have caused the damage that it did!
The story mentions failed AC equipment, but no real info on the exact nature. If my experience, AC failure units pissing water down the walls of a server room, and it cooking at 70C until the servers auto-power down is the main symptoms you get.
I dont see why you need to calculate area and kit volume etc. I would just
- position inert gas dispensers at one end of room
- put hole at other end
-in event of fire blast inert gas into room - allowing air to escape through hole
- when sensors reveal air gone and room full of inert gas, switch off.
Also if you have 24 cu m. of air and you double it with a gas, depending on what type, you get 2 atmo of pressure or 28.8 lb/sqr inch. while this might blow out a loose window pane it should not be enough to blow out walls. In a well designed data centre.
Yes hurricaines and tornados do blow down building using less pressure, however they have wind shear and wind velocity to help.
Gases can compress pretty well, and if your walls blow out due to a small change in the contents of a room, then those walls were made of paper.
The building shaking is likely as a consequence of the fixed equipment venting all that gas in a matter of a couple of seconds. There's gonna be an equal and opposite reaction to the gas being deployed somehow...
P.S. The SNP will most likely blame "Westminster" and/or David Cameron. Still, we've got road signs in Gaelic, and that's really important.
No need, Glasgow City Council is Labour run (and has been for years).
Also, the Gaelic tends to only get added when the signs are getting replaced anyway.
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