Data Center facilities, unlike our homes and office buildings, requires a different treatment in terms of protection against fire.
But before we touch on that topic, lets first understand the nature of fire. To do so, lets learn about the fire triangle or combustion triangle. This is the basic foundation for understanding the ingredients necessary for most fires. It has largely been replaced in the industry by the fire tetrahedron, which add further aspects.
The triangle illustrates the rule that in order to ignite and burn, a fire requires three elements: heat, fuel, and an oxidizing agent (usually oxygen) and the fire can be suppressed or extinguished by removing any one of them. Only in the right mixture or combination, will a fire occur.
The picture on the left is an example of a data center on slab floor (this is Sun’s Santa Clara data center). The theory behind cooling such a facility is to bring the cooling closer to the heat source and deliver it horizontally (row-based) or vertically (rack-based), instead of distributing over the sub-floor.
