Data center fire protection

Data center fire protection

Data center fire protection

Fires represent a serious financial threat to businesses. Datacenter fires could significantly disrupt communications service and ultimately slash revenues, and effect immeasurable negative impact on consumer confidence in your service.

Due to the concentration of equipment and data in a datacenter, the degree of potential damage that could occur from both a fire and conventional fire-extinguishing systems is unacceptable.

For instance, on March 10, 2021, a fire broke out in a room in one of our 4 datacenters in Strasbourg, SBG2. Firefighters immediately intervened to prevent the spread of the fire by using, as usual, a lot of water… As a result, the fire destroyed OVH’s SBG2 data center completely and four rooms in SBG1, according to an incident report on the company's website. UPS was down in the SBG3 facility as well.

How a fire destroyed a data center in France

Unnecessary Damages

Many customers of OVH, the largest Europe-native cloud provider, complained about downed websites and applications hosted at the campus in Eastern France. Some appeared to not have disaster recovery plans or backup sites…. The financial loss of this event is hard to evaluate.

Some data centers rely on inert gas fire extinguishing systems that can only delay propagation of fire and provide a serious threat to people inside. Moreover, such systems often damage hard drives as it happened in the data center of the Swedish stock exchange in Stockholm and ING Bank data center in Bucharest, Romania.

“A fire alarm was activated in Nasdaq Nordic's Computer Hall in the Digiplex facility in Upplands Väsby. Pressure and sound wave from the gas extinguishing system injured hundreds of computers, which in turn contributed to the historically longest stock market stop. Stockholm”

According to the ING Bank Data center report: “The noise levels of the gas during test discharge are reported to have exceeded 130dB, causing the hard disk drives inside the datacenter’s storage systems to vibrate and malfunction.”

About FirePASS's fire prevention system

FirePASS Oxygen Reduction System can provide permanent fire protection in any data center no matter how big it is. Most important is that it provides absolutely clean and safe environment for people that work inside.

Please contact us for more information.

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