General > General Technical Chat
The BIG EEVblog Server Fire
TomS_:
--- Quote from: james_s on April 08, 2021, 05:05:38 am ---I thought datacenters typically used Halon fire suppression systems?
--- End quote ---
I don't think anyone uses Halon any more, it would be something like FM200 these days. And yes, this would usually be installed in the server rooms.
You would usually get something like 30 seconds from alarms and strobes activating to evacuate before it is dumped into the room because yes, it's whole purpose is to displace oxygen to starve a fire.
But if the fire was caused by one of the generators, it's anyone's guess whether they installed the same fire suppression in that area. Presumably not if it got this bad!?
But there seems to be a missing piece of the puzzle (or at least I've missed it)... They say the fire was caused by a generator. The generators would not normally be installed in the same room as servers. So how does a generator fire end up leading to water damage to servers?? Unless it burned through a wall??
OVH also suffered a major fire recently. Interesting trend of events.
Ranayna:
Yay, EEVBlog is back :)
Interestingly the second datacenter fire that affected services that i use in only a couple of months. According to statistics the services i use should be save now for some time :p
Anyway, always interesting to see what can happen. Makes me glad that my employer has definitly not skimped of the equipment and setup of our internal datacenter.
Our internal datacenter is quite small, we only have 26 Racks. But it is set up very well: redundant cooling, redundant power (one leg UPS and generator protected). All the critical components are in separated rooms with at least 2 firewalls (the brick kind ;) ) separating them.
The room with the racks and the UPS room are equipped with a Novec fire suppression system. The generator room, on the other hand, is not. It was explained that it was, first, not really needed, since the generator has its own room, the fuel has its own room, and the datacenter itself is two rooms away. And secondly, misfires of the required early detection system might trigger on the slightest leaks of the generator. And refilling the Novec would supposedly cost around 20.000 Euro :D
This kind of setup is expensive, but at least for us, it seems to be worth it: We had not a single outage beyond faults of individual servers. Yet... :-BROKE
james_s:
--- Quote from: TomS_ on April 08, 2021, 06:35:03 am ---I don't think anyone uses Halon any more, it would be something like FM200 these days. And yes, this would usually be installed in the server rooms.
You would usually get something like 30 seconds from alarms and strobes activating to evacuate before it is dumped into the room because yes, it's whole purpose is to displace oxygen to starve a fire.
But if the fire was caused by one of the generators, it's anyone's guess whether they installed the same fire suppression in that area. Presumably not if it got this bad!?
But there seems to be a missing piece of the puzzle (or at least I've missed it)... They say the fire was caused by a generator. The generators would not normally be installed in the same room as servers. So how does a generator fire end up leading to water damage to servers?? Unless it burned through a wall??
OVH also suffered a major fire recently. Interesting trend of events.
--- End quote ---
Ah, yeah FM200 was what we had at that place, I just assumed it was a brand name for a Halon system, I never really looked into it.
Yes I wondered about that too, I would have thought they'd have the generators in a separate structure, but who knows, maybe the datacenter is in a highrise or something. I actually spent a night in Ogden UT once but it was close to 15 years ago and I don't think I ever went into town.
peter-h:
Well done on EEVBLOG for having kept good backups.
Not many people do that.
Also a lot of "hits" on forums are malicious, perhaps organised by people who got banned for behaving badly.
tszaboo:
--- Quote from: EEVblog on April 08, 2021, 03:41:53 am ---The lesson here is, whilst it's great to have a fully redundant automatic backup server, it was kinda silly to have it in the same datacenter!
We are going to ask Gorillaservers is they can provision one of the boxes in their LA data center, so if a whole city/state goes out the server will still operate.
--- End quote ---
I was taught by the back-end people that your second server shall be on another continent, with a different government in charge of the company running it.
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