FEATURE
DATA CENTRES: HOW TO STOP ELECTRICAL FIRES
Ash Crompton, Commercial Director, EMEA at nVent, looks at ways to reduce the causes and consequences of an electrical fire in a data centre.
In 2021, nearly 800,000 new websites will be created every day. In order to host the data from these sites as well as existing data from companies worldwide, there are nearly 5,000 data centres located around the globe. In 2021, there are 284 in the UK. Regardless of their composition or location, data centres all face the same potential risks: cyber-attacks (hacking, data theft, espionage), vandalism (theft of equipment, server breakage, arson), weather risks (floods, earthquakes and heatwaves) but the most important and damaging remains that of electrical fires.
Numerous and persistent threats Data centres are prone to hazards and heavy power loads and a defective piece of equipment can quickly lead to a short circuit or overheating. Typically, electrical fires are caused by faulty electrical installations or equipment, surges, short circuits, leakage currents, and electric arcs due to the degradation of insulation and connections in old or poorly maintained installations. The potential points of origin for fires are located throughout the electrical chain include: inverters, batteries, electrical cabinets, generators, fuel tanks, cables, servers, etc.
The amount of electricity required to keep data centres running alongside the combustible materials used also poses the risk of electrical fires. Extensive cabling and poor ventilation or air conditioning increases the risk of spreading the fire.
The weather can also be damaging, a heatwave, for example, can cause servers to overheat, especially in data centres with an air conditioning system that uses outside air to cool the equipment.
Disastrous consequences The materials of which data centres are composed are particularly combustible (cables, electronic components, transformers) and a fire can be devastating.
At a human level, data centres have teams on site who are potentially at risk in the event of a fire, mainly due to the risk of flames or smoke emissions which can be corrosive and which reduce visibility in the event of evacuation and emergency intervention. In the case of data centres located in populated areas, the risk to people living nearby must also be taken into account.
At an economic level the fire that broke out in an OVH datacentre in Strasbourg recently led to the shutdown of 3.6m websites for several days, a huge blow to e-commerce markets across Europe.
The damage is generally divided into material (physical destruction of servers and equipment on site) and immaterial (loss of professional data for hosted companies, closure of their sites and servers). The costs can then be staggering with the construction of a large data centre costing hundreds of millions of dollars and the financial cost to companies for using them, according to Gartner, is an average of $5,600 per minute, and up to 540,000 per hour for the largest companies.
Finally, the environmental impact should not be overlooked: data centres are filled with electronic
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