Or brilliant. Depends on whether flooding can destroy the data on harddrives.
(Admittedly a "movie plot" scenario. But if you want to wipe out the data in a plausibly deniable way without doing anything to the rest of the building...)
It doesn't destroy it, but it makes recovery of it hideously expensive.
I got the "joy" of dealing with a flooded data center on a second story of a very large building in, of all places, Phoenix, once.
Luckily the flooding was stopped at about the five inch level, which kept it well under the raised floor and was mostly a concern for the structural integrity of the building and whether or not the second floor, which was about two football fields big, would collapse into the first floor.
Five inches of water depth, two football fields big... you can do the math to figure how much that weighed. I did it real quick and evacuated non-essential personnel.
Luckily the building was originally built to house massive machinery on both floors, much heavier than an entire full data center weighs. (Printing presses.)
Root cause? Plugged drain pipe for air conditioning condensers combined with a monsoon week.
Secondary problem that made it far worse? Happened the week before occupancy and the water sensors under the raised floor weren't active yet.
The flooding was found on a Friday and the environmental sensors and alarms were scheduled to go online Monday and Tuesday.
And for that week, I drew the short straw and was the MFWIC. I was there for the site turn up while all of the more senior management and other senior engineering staff were at meetings at Corp HQ.
I got the contract engineering folks working on the load problem (they had access to building blueprints, I didn't), determined the building wouldn't collapse, got the disaster contacts called and the big pumps started, as well as got the plumbers to come clear all the damned drains so they'd do something, and appointed someone to oversee all those folks and escort them as needed throughout the weekend, and then caught my plane back to Denver -- while the site manager and usual site engineers swapped places with me in-flight.
They flew back in from meetings at Corp HQ in Denver after I updated them on all of the above.
We instituted a program to watch for early failures of everything that was installed on site (ours and customer's, since some of them had already started moving in) due to possible higher overall relative humidity and what not... never saw any problems other than metal raised floor framing having some surface rust and some fasteners rusting out. We never had gear problems and no customers ever complained of having any either.
The joys of building data centers. Meh. But if you're the MFWIC when the water is found where it shouldn't be, you have a lot of work to do.
Karma was cute on that trip though. The site manager told me as I headed for the airport to toss his extra house keys on the counter of his apartment (I was staying there on his couch) because I didn't have time to take them back to the data center. He didn't remember that he rode with someone to the airport and didn't bring his car keys and though he had his usual house key with him. Ha. He got to call a locksmith to get into his apartment when he got home.
Serves him right for leaving me with that mess. Hahaha. Nah. He was a good guy. It was just a running joke for a couple of years. I'd always ask him when he called Corporate asking about systems problems if he had any water under the floor...
