Practical Fire Protection in Computer Rooms and Data Centres
White Paper
Geoff Flower
December, 2010
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) including hardware, software and ancillary services has changed dramatically over the last 20 years. Similarly, the technology and application of fire protection systems used to protect ICT systems has also seen significant changes in technology.
As a result there has been a wide variety of fire protection technologies, systems and strategies adopted to provide fire protection to the ICT infrastructure. While some systems such as high sensitivity smoke detection are commonplace, there is a wide variety of design and installation configurations that are adopted.
With the advent of powerful desktop computers in the 80s & 90s computer systems were de-centralised. Mainframe systems were decommissioned in favour of personal computers on each desk. In the internet age and the advent of cloud computing, there has been a shift back to centralised systems to leverage processing power and energy efficiencies. Furthermore, technology advances have seen introduction of high density computing in the form of Blade servers and virtual machines, where a single machine may host a number of (many) physical and/or virtual servers.
This paper considers various aspects of fire protection in ICT Computer Rooms and Data Processing facilities from an equipment, system and strategic point of view. A critical review of common approaches to fire protection within ICT facilities has been undertaken examining the advantages and disadvantages.
The objective of the paper is to provide the reader with a view of good practice approaches to various forms fire protection within ICT facilities from a practical point of view.
About the Author
Geoff Flower Geoff Flower is the Engineering Services Manager at Walker Fire Protection, a leading specialist Fire Protection installation contractor. Geoff holds a degree in electrical engineering from Monash University along with post graduate certificate in performance based building and fire codes from Victoria University and a diploma in fire safety and risk engineering, also from Victoria University. Geoff has over 15 years experience across many aspects of fire protection and fire safety including system design, fire safety engineering, research and testing. It is this breadth and depth of experience that enables Geoff to derive practical solutions to complex technical fire protection and fire safety problems.