What is a Fire Suppression System in a Data Centre?

A data centre fire suppression system is a broad term used to describe any system that helps to prevent the spread of fire around your data centre. Once a fire breaks out, you won’t have a lot of time to act to help contain the blaze. Because of this, it’s crucial that you have a fully operational fire suppression system in place to protect your centre from further damage. A mass data loss event is often a killing blow for data centres and even if it doesn’t wipe your business out entirely, it will be a very costly incident.

Fire suppression systems are important because they offer a solution should a fire break out. Whilst mitigation before is still absolutely necessary, the simple fact is that a fire can come from anywhere in your data centre, whether it be cables, wiring, hardware or any other equipment. Because of this, it can be difficult to spot every single potential risk, especially if you have a big space. The risk of fire is even greater if your centre has a raised floor or suspended ceiling.   

It’s not only the equipment that you’re protecting in your data centre, but the staff as well. With a fully operational data centre fire suppression system you give your employees enough time to safely evacuate the premises. By using equipment such as firewalls, sprinklers, clean agents and fire rated floor assemblies, you help to slow down and control the fire. 

Types of Fire Suppression Systems

Although there are many ways in which a fire can be controlled, there are generally two types of data centre fire suppression system; fire suppression with water or fire suppression with gas. The real difficulty in fire suppression is finding a system that doesn’t cause further damage to your equipment, meaning anything that sprays large amounts of water or leaves behind any potentially harmful residue shouldn’t be used.

Fire Suppression with Water

One of the most common forms of fire data centre suppression system is a sprinkler. It might seem strange to have a sprinkler system in an area where water will cause such excessive damage, so special sprinklers that disperse a fog-like mist are used. This mist aims to cool the area down via evaporation without causing harm to any of the equipment. The mist can also enter into your equipment meaning fires can be reached even if they're within a cabinet, something that couldn't be achieved with a regular sprinkler system.

Water based data centre fire suppression systems work in a slightly different way to regular sprinklers; heat from the fire melts a fusible link that sends a signal to disperse the water. This is to protect your centre from any unnecessary detections from faults, although it does mean that fire already has to be hot enough to melt the link. Ultimately, this means that there may already be substantial fire damage by the time the sprinklers activate. 

Fire Suppression with Gas  

A gas type data centre fire suppression system is another popular way to control a blaze, although there are two main ways in which it can work; either by using a clean agent or inert gases.

A clean agent system refers to a gas that contains chemicals to cool the flames, usually halocarbons or fluorinated ketones. They work by decreasing the heat by absorption and are completely safe to be used around humans. A system of pipes is installed around a room and will activate when smoke or fire is detected. Once the fire is controlled, the gas is safely and simply removed using the building's ventilation system.    

Clean agent based systems are designed to stop the fire before the use of water sprinklers, meaning they can be used before a fire has caused excessive damage to your equipment. Another benefit to using a clean agent system is that it won’t leave any residue behind which can cause further damage. The gas is also non-conductive and non-conductive. 

The second form of gas based data centre fire suppression system, an inert gas based system, uses gas to reduce the rooms oxygen content. Once the oxygen is low enough a fire will naturally die out, without making it difficult to breathe for people within the building. Because hard drives in data centres can be damaged by loud noises, special nozzles that muffle the sound during activation must be used.    

Inert gas based systems are usually made up of a blend of atmospheric gases nitrogen and argon. Because these gases can already be found in the atmosphere, they cause no harm once they are dispersed, making them a far more environmentally friendly option to clean agent based systems.