[AusNOG] Hypoxic Fire Suppression [was Global Switch]

[Craig Askings]

From what I recall (fuzzy) pipe dc3 at Fortitude Valley was the biggest single zone install of inergen in Australia at the time.

On Jan 13, 2014 6:15 PM, Tony de Francesco <tonyd at pue.com.au> wrote:
>
> Sorry Bevan I should have said Inergen is not used in large data centres with open floor plates :-) Segregating a large DC into small fire compartments is essentially the same as building lots of small DCs.
>
> Have a look at the number of Inergen cylinders required compared to FM200 cylinders and the difference is very obvious.
>
> Hypoxic systems have become very common in large European DCs largely because FM200 is banned. 
>
> Regards
>
> Tony de Francesco
> Technical Director
> P.U.E. Pty Ltd
> Mob: +61 (0) 457 701 179
> Email: tonyd at pue.com.au
>
> On 13/01/2014 7:07 PM, "Bevan Slattery" <bevan at slattery.net.au> wrote:
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>> From: Tony de Francesco <tonyd at pue.com.au>
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>> > Yes but Inergen is not used in large DCs because of the volume required.
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>> Simply not correct.  Most large DC’s segregate spaces to allow full discharge in a specific area.
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>> > The European system is a hypoxic system at low pressure. Very different to dumping a whole bunch of gas through high pressure nozzles.
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>> Challenge with this system in Australia (which I looked at early in NEXTDC days) was that in Australia you need to continually supply fresh air to a DC under the building code.  It is difficult to continually deliver a hypoxic environment across a large facility considering the Australian standards and the need to continually extract O2/Inject N2 into the air supply.
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>> Hypoxic systems are typically used in things like ship engine rooms to reduce the risk of catastrophic fire or in environments with low traffic flow (archives).  In a colocation environment in Australia I couldn’t get an insurer to get their head around having staff and customers in a facility with a reduced O2, let alone the technical issues around a requirement to continually alter the air mix due to the building code.
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>> So if you want to maintain a lower level of O2 you had to operate the Agent Generator (essentially lower O2 in a bottle) 24/7 to maintain the O2 levels at the Fire Type 2 levels.  The amount of fresh air required in a 20,000m facility that had a volumetric size of 100 megalitres is “significant”.  Very significant.
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>> All in all it wasn’t technically or commercially viable for NEXTDC at the time to provide a continuous hypoxic environment.  This may have changed.  There was some investigation into using an agent generator to create the refill in case of discharge removing the need for a refill from alternate gas suppliers.  But the equipment needed to refill 20 megalitres (hall discharge +1) was significant and the bottles required was considerably greater from memory.  Also not all gas discharge systems are as high pressure these days so you may want to check out the latest to ensure your points are valid.
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>> Cheers
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>> [b]
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