G 0.4 Contamination, Dust, Corrosion

Many IT devices contain, in addition to electronics, mechanically operating components, such as in hard drives and removable drives, DVD drives, printers, scanners, etc., as well as fans in processors and power supplies. With increasing demands on quality and speed, these devices must operate with ever greater precision. Even minor contaminations can disrupt device operation. Dust and contaminations can, for example, occur in larger quantities through the following activities:

• Work on walls, raised floors, or other building components,
• hardware retrofitting work, or
• unpacking of equipment (e.g., swirling Styrofoam).

Existing safety switches in the devices usually trigger timely shutdown. While this keeps the direct damage to the equipment, repair costs, and downtime small, it means that the affected device is not available.

Devices and infrastructure can also be attacked by corrosion. This can have negative effects not only on IT but even on building security.

Corrosion can also indirectly create further threats. For example, water can leak from corroded areas (see G 0.3 Water).

Overall, contamination, dust, or corrosion can thus lead to failures or damage to IT components and supply systems. As a result, proper information processing can be compromised.

Examples:

• When setting up a server in a media room together with a copier and a fax machine, the paralysis of the processor fan and the power supply fan occurred one after another due to the high dust load in the room. The failure of the processor fan led to sporadic server crashes. The failure of the power supply fan finally led to overheating of the power supply, resulting in a short circuit, which ultimately caused the server to fail completely.
• To hang a whiteboard in an office, the building services department drilled holes in the wall. The employees had briefly left their office for this. Upon return to the workstation, a PC no longer worked. The cause was drill dust that had entered the PC power supply through the ventilation slots.