[olug] Computer Room Fire Suppression

[Hurley, Rod]

This brings up a good point.  What is the cost of your datacenter's unavailability?  

I often hear this argument, that 15 grand (our cost to put in fm-200 for 400 sq ft room) outweighs the cost of the equipment.  Not sure how anyone can say that.  An admin salary alone is much higher, and they are needed to manage the equipment, so it must be worth more than that.  Whether you have $10 million in hardware or $10 thousand, your company should have some need for business continuity.  Water on servers doesn't promote that, and in fact can make the situation worse.  One server that burns up can set off FM-200 sensors and you would spend $1000 to refill the tank with a certified tech.  You now need to replace one server, and your gas.  The heat nozzle on your sprinklers needs to hit 165 degrees, and that would take a room fire to do so.  Then it sprays the entire pipe onto the room, until it's empty.  Not sure if you have seen that black sludge, but it's nasty.  It isn't like in the movies, believe me.  Yes, it might not pop/spray, and you might only lose one server, but that's a gamble I'm not going to take.

-R

-----Original Message-----
From: olug-bounces at olug.org [mailto:olug-bounces at olug.org] On Behalf Of Carl Lundstedt
Sent: Wednesday, June 01, 2011 9:31 AM
To: olug at olug.org
Subject: Re: [olug] Computer Room Fire Suppression

We use water, but it's not because "we don't care" but:

a) Proper machine room fire suppression is very expensive.  If the cost of the system approaches the cost of all the equipment in the machine room it doesn't make much sense.  We're well past that point in equipment, but I'd rather put money into a new air handler to increase
our capacity than fire suppression.   

b) All the hoops we'd have to hop through to get certified to work around fire suppression.  We'd like students to have access to the machine room. That can become a logistical nightmare where proper fire suppression is deployed.

The risk/cost analysis is not easy, please don't trivialize our choices by saying we "don't care".

Carl Lundstedt
UNL
On Wed, 2011-06-01 at 09:20 -0500, Charles Bird wrote:
> most ppl use fm400 i think.
> others dont care and use water.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 9:19 AM, Charles Bird <cbird.omaha at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > chuck norris.
> >
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 9:08 AM, <aric at omahax.com> wrote:
> >
> >> What are you guys using for computer room fire suppression?
> >> _______________________________________________
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> >
> >
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