Previous Winning Entries: Metal Dust Causes Complete Power Failure
"Our El Paso, TX facility recently installed a new UPS for its data center. As a result of the construction, minute particles of metal dust were left in the data center. Within a month of the installation, we suffered a complete power failure in our data center. After investigation, it was determined that a small amount of metal dust found its way onto the UPS's circuit board (through AC vent circulation) and bridged a trace which resulted in the shorting out of the UPS."

Smoke from Nearby Fire Triggers Sprinkler System
Even though your data center or server room may be well designed and secure, don't forget to scrutinize the neighborhood and the surrounding infrastructure.

Lisa DuBrock, CPA, CBCP of Radian Compliance shared the story of a financial institution that experienced a fire at the headquarters cafeteria.  "While the fire did not spread, the smoke did travel from the cafeteria to the data center which was located next door.  Although a small fire, the smoke and heat were enough to trip the sprinkler system into operation thereby shutting down the computer operations. Weaknesses in the design of the fire suppression system led to the unnecessary flooding of the data center.  If it weren’t for a disaster recovery process in place, many days worth of transactions would have been lost instead of only 2 hours."

Data Clean once was called in to perform a cleaning job where the plumber had been called to rod the drains in the cafeteria; the sinks and dishwasher were backing up.  It sounded like a simple plumbing job until the plumber broke right through the drain pipe and the backup spilled out into the room below.  That room was the corporate data center.  Data Clean technicians had to clean the drain waste and ground up food out of the computer equipment.  Yuck!