"Amazing low cost"?
They're one of the most expensive data center operators I know.
Hetzner is about half the price. But neither can have more than 3 HDD per machine which is just absurd.
Hetzner is about half the price. But neither can have more than 3 HDD per machine which is just absurd.
Not sure where you get that information from. Some of Hetzner's “auction” machines have 10 drives, many of OVH's offerings support more than three (even some of the budget range, Kimsufi, are 4x2T).
By contrast, the typical data centers people know which have fire suppression systems appear to have much of their key electrical equipment (and control systems) located in the same area or adjoining rooms of the same facility [3] [4] [5] [6].
In fact, there is even a video recording of a UPS failure [7] showing a lucky case where no one was injured and not too much damage was caused. The employee lingered in the room when they should have immediately left at the first sign of danger. Arc flashes are a scary possibility as shown in [8] and [9] because of the need to switch multiple megawatts of electricity through complex power systems that includes UPS battery banks and automatic diesel generators.
There are video recordings demonstrating how fire suppression systems work [10] [11] and a description of how a data center would be designed to respond to a fire (including closing ventilation dampers) [12] [13]. I'm sure fire suppression systems are not cheap, but in the grand scheme of a data center full of millions of dollars of equipment (not to mention cost of customer downtime) surely it would make sense to install them.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gua9j4BZKKg
[3] https://youtu.be/qUmLnSEVVDw?t=716
[4] https://youtu.be/LYncuYp0UVo?t=184
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeFtwtvy4Wc
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGthey0Q1dw
[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lhlhj-_7Rrc
[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipW4D0yQyME
[9] https://youtu.be/6hpE5LYj-CY?t=34
[10] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjii88Jv6AU
[11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjZKsKXL-hI
They can definitely shut the vents at the top so that the problem with air circulation during a fire wouldn't appear. Furthermore, their dcs are only on one level, so it couldn't spread upwards. I don't know if they got an external fuse/switch, but it seems likely that there's something between substation and the individual dcs.
As for fire suppresion, I tried to spot one but couldn't either. But he never shows all parts of the DC, it could be in a part that's not shown.
However, with the design they use, if they can ensure that a fire is contained within one DC, the damage would probably be comparably low, especially if you consider the space they have between the racks.