NEWS
The Evils of Inergen
posted by JoVo
What is Inergen? Well, Inergen is a blend of inert atmospheric gases that contains 52% nitrogen, 40% argon, and 8% carbon dioxide. It's a clean agent used as a gaseous fire suppressant. It's eco-friendly and nontoxic. What it does is it lowers the concentration of oxygen in an area so that it can no longer support combustion. It's also better than older gaseous suppression systems. Back in the day, they used to use plain carbon dioxide or halon gas. The problem with these gases is that they... well... they can kill you.
Inergen is different because it creates only a 3% concentration of carbon dioxide in the space where it's discharged. This causes the human body to take deeper breaths (a physiological adaptation given to us by wonderful, wonderful natural selection), allowing our bodies to make more efficient use of the available oxygen.
Unfortunately, even though Inergen kills fires without killing humans, it also kills hard drives. And so that's what happened to us this weekend. Here's what our webhost had to say about it:
On Saturday, February 20th at approximately 2:20 p.m. MDT, the server your account is on experienced some hardware failure as a result of an annual fire system inspection at our Data Center (DC). An inadvertent release of Inergen was triggered in the DC environment. The release was triggered by an actuator that was not removed as required in the DC's pre-test checklist. As such, the entire DC was impacted at some level, however not all servers were affected. This error was not the result of a mistake by WestHost employees, our hardware or systems. The mistake was triggered by an error from a vendor. With that said, we take responsibility and are doing everything we can to restore all systems completely.
There were multiple servers impacted by this outage; some of the servers have had damaged hardware replaced while other servers need to be restored from backups. A large majority of the servers that were affected have since had all services restored and are back online. We still have a few remaining servers that are experiencing problems. We are doing everything we can to restore those remaining servers as quickly as possible.
So there you go. Shit happens. The test was being run by the company that does the disaster management for Westhost, Consonus Technologies. Ironically, their error caused its own disaster. Enjoy the irony there.
Anyway, we're back, we're glad to be back, and hopefully we'll get to stay back. I've been doing business with Westhost for years now and this has never happened. With any luck, in all the rest of the time we'll continue to do business with them, it won't happen again.
Sorry for the inadvertent shut-down. But we're back, and that's all that matters.