introduction

Data center fire safety is crucial for the safe operation of cabinets and the safety of people's lives and property. In order to ensure the safe operation of the data center and the rapid evacuation of personnel in the building in case of fire and other emergencies, scientific fire safety design is particularly important. This article will introduce the principles and methods of fire safety design of data center buildings, in order to improve everyone's understanding and attention to data center fire safety.

Data Center Fire Design Specification Fire Case -

Data center fire cases

July 2022: Google Cloud data center in London failed. According to a report released by Google, the cause of the accident was "multiple cooling system failures at the same time", coinciding with extreme heat in London, with abnormally high outside temperatures and the inability of the machine to maintain a safe operating temperature. The outage was not resolved until the next morning.

December 2021: A fire broke out at the Cyber1 building in Kuningan, South Jakarta, which serves as an internet exchange for APJII-Cyber, a data center in Jakarta, causing direct disruptions to numerous internet services and data centers.

May 2021: A severe fire broke out in the computer room of European cloud computing giant OVH in Strasbourg, France. It is reported that the fire has brought down 3.6 million websites, and some customer data has been completely lost and cannot be recovered.

May 2021: A fire broke out in the pipeline of the computer room building of a domestic data center head operator in Shenzhen, Guangdong, resulting in the outage of multiple hosting server networks.

November 2018: A fire broke out in a building in downtown Seoul of KT, one of South Korea's three major telecom operators. Due to damage to communication equipment, the accident caused South Korea's social infrastructure such as police, hospitals, and finance to be forced to shut down.

August 2018: A fire broke out in a building in Tokyo that was under construction at the Amazon AWS Tokyo data center. The fire burned for 8 hours, killing 5 people and injuring 50 others.

April 2017: A fire broke out in the network data center of a university in Beijing, and the cause of the fire was a failure of the UPS battery pack, and the campus network of many Beijing universities collapsed.

October 2015: Microsoft's Azure Shanghai data center failed due to a fire and power outage in the computer room, causing Azure to be unable to provide normal services, affecting users in industries including finance, Internet, and real estate.

July 2014: A fire broke out in the data center of a commercial bank in Chongqing, and the entire computer room was burned down. It is rumored that the direct loss is far more than 100 million.

With a large number of data center equipment and high energy consumption, the inventory of data center accidents that have occurred in recent years has caused significant losses that are difficult to predict each time. It can be seen that scientific data center fire safety design is crucial.

Data center room fire - common causes of fires in data centers

2.1 Equipment failure

Since the power distribution system, electrical equipment, UPS system, air conditioning and other equipment in the computer room are in working condition 24 hours a day, long-term high-load operation and aging faults may cause fires;

2.2 Electrical cable failure

electrical circuit short circuit, overload, excessive contact resistance, etc.;

2.3 Combustible materials

the use or presence of combustible materials in the computer room;

2.4 Static electricity

Static electricity can be generated by the operation of communication equipment and the clothing of workers. If the grounding of the computer room is not properly handled and a high potential is formed, electrostatic conductivity will occur, which is easy to generate sparks and ignite the surrounding combustibles.

2.5 Other human causes

Special reminder: The data room in the cold winter area will use the liquid pipeline insulation system such as electric heat tracing, be sure to fully inspect and conduct insulation tests, especially electrical heat tracing, if it fails, it is very easy to cause a fire.