General > General Technical Chat

The BIG EEVblog Server Fire

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artag:

--- Quote from: Towger on April 08, 2021, 09:23:33 am ---
From the sounds of it, I would not be surprised if the generators were on the roof.  Normally I would have expected the generators to be in a separate building.  But I have heard of similar issues with mission critical UPS systems failing.  If you have a fire and call you call any local fire department, they will want all power turned off.  They don't care about your business model etc, minimising risk to their firefighters is more important.  The same goes if you call out the lifeboat, their job is to save life, saving the vessel is of secondary importance.

--- End quote ---

All the reports seem to say that the generators caught fire, the remaining power was taken down by the fire department, and that some servers were in danger of water damage.

My conclusion is that the fire department applied plenty of water and a little of it got into a small area of servers. Perhaps near, but not colocated with the fiery genset.
 

ejeffrey:

--- Quote from: TomS_ on April 08, 2021, 06:35:03 am ---
--- 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.

--- End quote ---

Halon and FM200 *do not work* by displacing oxygen, that is a persistent myth. They work by neutralizing the free radicals that allow fire to propagate.  This allows them to be used in much smaller quantities than would be needed to extinguish a fire by oxygen displacement.  Typically they are used at <10% concentration so they only lower the oxygen concentration slightly.  You still want to evacuate because the distribution is not uniform and also because -- THERE IS A FIRE, but generally they are low risk to humans.

CO2 fire extinguisher systems do work by displacing oxygen, and full-room CO2 systems are not generally used in occupied areas because of this.

james_s:

--- Quote from: coppice on April 08, 2021, 11:55:01 am ---In the early 80s the company I worked for kept changing its insurers each year. These alternated between pro-halon insurers and pro-water insurers. We had halon and sprinkler systems alternately installed and ripped out of the computer room I oversaw for several years.

--- End quote ---

Seems like they could just leave both systems in place and disable the one they weren't using.

james_s:

--- Quote from: MadScientist on April 08, 2021, 10:35:35 am ---All their reports say they had a mechanical genset  failure resulting in a fire. So this isn’t a switch gear fault I suspect. The issue seems to be the proximity  of servers to the Gensets. It sounds like they were in the same space  :palm:

--- End quote ---

The pictures Dave posted look like a random light industrial park of the sort of place my friend's machine shop is in, there's even a sports bar & grill in one of the units. Looks like the genset has to be in the same space, there isn't anywhere else to put it.

madires:

--- Quote from: Hamster on April 08, 2021, 04:54:52 pm ---Webhosting talk forum: https://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1842301

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I would abort continuing to host anything at this data center, here in Florida, most all data centers do NOT use water.. they use an FM200 Fire Suppression System, also, Generators are not co-located with the data center, they are usually detached just in case something like this happens, Generators due tend to go, and when the go, they go violently..  the worst part is, this data center probably had multiple gensets, covering the load, when one went down, it caused a cascade effect going down the line..  Fuel should of also been shut off and isolated, but it appears not?  There should of been 0 water damage inside the facilities, this clearly is some kind of failed engineering design of a building that probably should of not been designed to be a data center.

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--- End quote ---

Wishful thinking! In case of a fire the fire brigade decides what to do. If they think it's a good idea to hose down all servers despite a FM-200 fire suppression system you can't do much about that. Local regulations might force you to use water. Or the management board tells you to use water because it's cheap and the insurance will pay for any damages. Fire is one of the more likely events, but there are also many more, and in those cases it doesn't matter if the fire suppression system uses water or something more hardware friendly. If you need to keep your platform running 24x7 you have to design a redundant solution, i.e. you can't rely on a single data center. Complaining about a data center using a water based fire suppression system is laughable. Simply do your homework!

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