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Firefighters Extinguish Data Center Fire But

Data center uptime is categorized by tiers based on availability. A Tier 1 center guarantees 99.671% availability, while a Tier 4 center guarantees 99.995% availability. It is essential to keep various systems, including electric power supply and cooling, continuously operating to maintain such high levels of availability. It is essential to protect the data center from fires that can permanently damage IT equipment, reducing availability to 0%.

At 10:20 on September 10, 2024 a fire was reported in a Digital Realty data center in Singapore.  Firefighters spraying water eventually extinguished the fire.  Alibaba, which runs some of its cloud service from the data center, reported “As of 20:23 on September 11, 2024 Beijing time, the fire department is still addressing safety risks at the site, and operation and maintenance engineers are waiting for permission to enter the server building.”  Several days later Alibaba provided this update: “As of 14:00 on September 16, 2024 Beijing time, the migration and restoration of the affected hardware and machineries is in progress as planned, and the remaining affected cloud products are gradually being restored. Since some of the affected hardware and machineries are located in the dangerous and blocked area of the building where access is not allowed and some hardware and machineries require to be carefully dried in order to ensure data security, hence the restoration of some long tail machines and inventories may take a longer time.”

More information on this incident can be found in Data Center Dynamics article  “Alibaba ‘Carefully Dries’ . . .”

To reduce potential data center downtime due to a fire, some operators choose to use alternative fire extinguishing agents which use either no or minimal water while extinguishing fires. GSI can provide information on alternative fire extinguishing agents such as clean agents covered in NFPA 2001, water mist covered in NFPA 750, and hybrid agents covered in NFPA 770.

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