T 0.4 Pollution, Dust, Corrosion
Besides electronics, many IT devices contain mechanical components, such as hard drives and removable disks, DVD drives, printers, scanners etc. and coolers for CPUs and power supply units also. With increasing quality and speed requirements, these devices must function more and more precisely. Even small amounts of pollution can lead to disruption of a device. Dust and pollution in significant amounts can for example be generated by the following activities:
- repairs on walls, raised floors (double floors) or other building parts,
- hardware upgrades or similar work
- packaging (e.g. Styrofoam particles)
Existing safety circuits in the equipment usually ensure a timely switching off of the device. This restricts the direct damage to the affected device, keeps the repair costs low and the downtimes short, but the affected device remains unavailable during down-time.
In addition, equipment and infrastructure can be damaged by corrosion. This can have a negative impact not only on IT but even on the safety of buildings.
Corrosion can also indirectly lead to further risks. For example, when water flows out of corroded water pipes (see T 0.3 Water).
Altogether, pollution, dust or corrosion can therefore lead to failure of or damage to IT components and supply facilities. As a consequence, proper information processing can be impaired.
Examples:
- After installation of a server in a media room, together with a photocopier and a fax machine, errors within the CPU cooler and the power supply fan occurred successively due to the high dust level in the room. The breakdown of the CPU cooler led to sporadic server crashes. The breakdown of the power supply fan finally led to an overheating of the power supply unit resulting in a short circuit, which eventually entailed a total failure of the server.
- To hang up a blackboard in an office, holes were drilled into the wall by the site technical service. During this, the office employee had left his office for a short time. After he returned to his workplace he noticed that his PC no longer functioned. The reason for this was the ingress of dust from drilling into the PC power supply unit through the ventilation slits.