The selection of a fire prevention and control system for a data center fire safety requires careful planning. You cannot plan it yourself just by looking at references from some literature and the experiences of those closest to you. You still have to consult a fire protection specialist in your city to plan a reliable security system to protect your data center from fire hazards.
Contents
Fatal Organizational Destroyer
Data center fires are rare. But if this data center catches fire, then the entire company or organization can be destroyed instantly. When building your office construction, you should focus on the fire protection of this data center. The data center fire safety system must be able to protect it from any potential fire hazard. The protection includes four essential elements such as mitigation, detection, appropriate suppression, and recovery.
Fire Safety with Mitigation
Mitigation is one of the easiest and low-budget parts of the data center fire safety system to implement. Since it is too easy, people usually skip this fire mitigation. In fact, you only have to do the work of sorting among the various types of items stored in the data center.
Try not to store flammable materials in the Data Center. Combustible materials are usually made of plastic or paper, which also contain particulate contaminants. You should not bring plastic packaging boxes or cardboard boxes into the data center. The next thing fire mitigation you can do in the data center is to scan the main power connection.
Do this at least once a year by performing infrared thermal imaging to detect loose joints before they become dangerous. Loose connections due to information technology loads usually cause the potential for a fire hazard to increase due to electrical contractions.
Dual Interlocked as Fire Detector
Shutting down a company’s data center is impossible. When implementing smoke or fire detection as fire protection in the data center, technicians usually use a dual interlocked system to activate smoke detection before things go wrong. The most common fire detection systems used in data centers are very early smoke detectors and fire alarm aspiration sensing technologies.
The aspiration sensing technology system is the cheapest fire control system. While early smoke detectors can identify and respond to fire hazards by using portable extinguishers long before standard heads detect them. The way smoke or fire detectors work as a simple data center fire safety system is to suck a sample of air through a small pipe. This tool can even distinguish between smoke and dust.
Proper Fire-Fighting
One of the data center fire safety systems, which is an important element is proper fire suppression. There are various ways you can do to be able to extinguish the fire. You can use gas or sprinklers to fight a fire in the data center. The most important thing is that you use the right tools, such as choosing a dry pipe design where the pipe will be filled with compressed air or nitrogen to keep it rust-free.
This system can also warn you about a leak before the water comes out. When two detectors sound, then at that time, new water will enter the system. But the water will not come out until the fire melts the fused link in the head. Many companies have complained about the drawbacks of this dry pipe design because the data center area will be filled with a lot of smoke.
Meanwhile, gas-based data center fire-fighting usually consists of clean agents and inert gas. Data center fire safety systems use clean agents containing chemicals that can break the fire triangle by removing heat. Then the inert gas system will reduce the oxygen level in the room so that the fire can no longer be lit, and at that time, the people who are in it can still breathe. However, there is a particular level of noise that is usually produced by gas-based fire suppression systems. So, whatever fire extinguishing method you take, you should first consult with a fire protection specialist in your city.
PT Totalfire Indonesia as a fire protection specialist in Jakarta, Indonesia, working closely with the engineering team for years of experience. You can consult us about the data center fire safety system you want to implement in your company. All of our engineering calculations are by the National Fire Protection Association, USA. Contact us now to get an offer package for the protection of your Data Center.