Cabinet Based Fire Suppression Systems

Cabinet Based Fire Suppression is yet another first here at ScaleMatrix. This ingenious system provides clients with exceptional protection, while eliminating the chance of outage from an incident caused by someone else in the Data Center. Should a fire or issues occur in your cabinet, this system reduces the time it takes to bring your services back online to just minutes, instead of hours or days at a traditional hosting center using a facility wide fire suppression agent. Real innovation helping you mitigate risk, only at ScaleMatrix.

Managing fire suppression systems in large enterprise class data centers can be tricky.  In a vast majority of legacy facilities (those built more than 5 years ago) the fire suppression system is tied directly into a facility wide Emergency Power Off (EPO) switch, which in the event of a fire, facilitates the disconnection of electrical service as a means to remove the source of fire.   In more advanced facilities, these EPO switches are segmented into as many as three zones, so that if a fire does occur, only 1/3 of the facility is affected by the incident.

Once a fire is detected and an EPO switch triggered, the next step is to disperse a fire suppressing agent into the facility.  Depending on the system being deployed, getting back into the Data Center after an agent has been released can take hours or even days.   Either way, the power is off to the affected Data Center zone and you can expect no less than “hours” of downtime following the event, if not worse!

 

Fire Suppression by ScaleMatrix – Data Center 2.0
At ScaleMatrix, individual fire detection, suppression, and EPO systems are deployed at the cabinet level.  These individualized systems protect each cabinet from the risk of fire, while ensuring that an incident which affects one client or cabinet – has no impact on the surrounding Data Center or clients located nearby.

The system utilizes FM-200 gas, which has no impact on the server and network hardware within the cabinet.  Further, in the event of a fire, following the discharge of the system – an individual rack can be reset, recharged, and powered back up in minutes instead of hours.

This revolutionary system eliminates the chance of a facility wide outage caused by a single client, and brings the RTO (Return to Operation) projection down from hours to just minutes in the case of an actual fire event.   Just another game-changing innovation, available only to clients at ScaleMatrix.