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Comment by mrbluecoat | Hacker News Reader

I agree. No automated fire suppression system for critical infrastructure with no backup?

That may not be a perfect answer. One issue with fire suppression systems and spinning rust drives is that the pressure change etc. from the system can also ‘suppress’ the glass platters in drives as well.

I'd be interested in if you can even use dry fire suppression on the 5th floor of a building.

Reminds me of the classic video[1] showing how shouting at the harddrives make them go slower.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

That's why the top-security DCs that my employer operates have large quantities of Nitrogen stored, and use that slightly lower the O2 saturation of the air in the case of fire.

Yes, it's fucking expensive, that's one of the reason you pay more for a VM (or colocation) than at Hetzner or OVH. But I'm also pretty confident that single fire wouldn't destroy all hard drives in that IT space.

At first you think what an incompetent government would do such things, but even OVH pretty much did the same a few years ago. Destroyed some companies in the progress. A wooden floor in a datacenter with backups in the same building …

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ovhcloud-fire-rep...

Battery fire is impossible to suppress.

Much harder, but not impossible.

Lithium ion batteries go into thermal runaway. The flame can be somewhat suppressed by displacing oxygen and/or spraying shit on it to prevent the burning of material. But it's still going thermalnuclear and putting out incredibly hot gasses. The only way to suppress it is by dunking the batteries in water to sap the energy out of them.

That's why in high-quality DCs, battery backup is in a separate room with good fire isolation from the IT space.

Yes, the servers still have some small batteries on their mainboards etc, but it's not too bad.

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