[AusNOG] [AUSNog] : Re Data Centre Fire Suppression Safety

[Bevan Slattery]

It’s pretty much all been said.

Halon (long gone).  Reaction sucks oxygen out of air.
FM200 (safe but being phased out).  Heard it can leave a residue despite the brochure saying not.
Inergen  more common (and others like it).  Fundamentally mostly nitrogen that drops oxygen below 15% and drops temperature.  These are two components of a fire (heat, fuel and oxygen).  People can operate comfortably below 15% oxygen.  In fact at 10% you can still function more than enough to pick up your gear and leave the room.

I did quite a bit of research on reduced oxygen environments (hypoxic) which is used on (Firepass etc.) http://www.firepass.com/oxygen-reduction-fire

Obviously dry pipe is used a lot. The issues with gas suppression today are more around noise (and vibration) and temp drop and they relate to spinning disks and circuit boards, more than people.

The issues around dry pipe is, well when it goes off, it’s not very dry and water/equipment certainly doesn’t mix.

Cheers

B

________________________________
From: AusNOG <ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net> on behalf of Paul Wilkins <paulwilkins369 at gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2018 3:53 pm
To: AusNOG at lists.ausnog.net
Subject: [AusNOG] [AUSNog] : Re Data Centre Fire Suppression Safety

Every data centre has a fire suppression system. We're not used to thinking of this as a hazardous environment, but consequent totwo techs being found dead working on a fire suppression system in Antarctica<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/12/antarctica-two-technicians-dead-mcmurdo-station-ross-island>, I find myself wondering yet again, why there aren't more stringent controls around the fire suppression systems in data centres: viz - when you enter a data centre, how confident can you be you're not going to be quietly asphyxiated?

Kind regards

Paul Wilkins

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