Whether you have a 200,000 square foot data center or a server rack with a few blades, your data island is a mission critical business component. Lose that data to a fire and you’ve lost the world with regard to your enterprise. What if there was a document—say, about 17 pages long—that showed you how the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, IBM, Sun Microsystems and other data center monoliths make fire damage extremely unlikely. What if?
There is such as document. It has existed and been updated since 1960, it is available to anyone to read for free and to own for $37 — and you don’t know about it.
Simple and commonsensical, the National Fire Protection’s NFPA 75, “Standard for the Protection of Information Technology Equipment,” is a detailed, explanatory almost-checklist for how to keep your business’ heart beating in case of a fire. While the standard was written for larger data centers stocked with mainframes and Cray and IBM BlueGene supercomputers, its wisdom is applicable to smaller setups. In 2011, a revised version of the standard will be released that addresses a wider audience.
NFPA 75 is under the covers of other standards that are in place, says Brian Rawson, senior program manager for Installation Planning with IBM. Rawson’s role is to provide business and technical support to data installations in the field worldwide. “Typically, this standard falls under the umbrella of the fire sprinkler standards. If a building has a water sprinkler standard, then usually so shall the data center.”
But by following NFPA 75, you go above and beyond. “It means you have more options, and that’s where the standard comes into play,” says Rawson, who is a principal on the NFPA 75 committee.
First Evaluate the Risk
Anyone who is considering an upgrade to the company’s data center should consider fire safety – but many IT professionals don’t know where to start. These guidelines are just a sample of what is in the standard, which also touches on electrical systems and other building code issues, telling you explicitly where to go for more information.
Clear thinking leads to clear planning, says Thomas Wysocki, a technical consultant and senior scientist for Guardian Services, a fire protection research firm and a member of NFPA 75′s committee. “The data is often more important than the equipment itself. You can replace the equipment easier than you can replace the data,” he says.
A CIO has plenty of questions to answer. First and foremost: Are your systems in charge of life safety, such as hospital services or air traffic control? What is the potential for fire; for example, are you located in an industrial facility where manufacturing could raise the potential for danger? What is the economic loss to your business if you had to shut down for a period of time or if you lost records? What is the economic loss of some or all of your equipment?
When evaluating your risk considerations, remember to evaluate your records. Classify your data into three kinds of records: Important, Master, and Vital. The standard qualifies these records according to the difficulty of replacing them. For example, you can replace important records with considerable expense and delay. Master records are those that you turn to when you need to rebuild your database. Vital records are irreplaceable, in which the reproduction is not as valuable as the original, the records are needed to sustain your business, or they are the records that would help you recover from a disaster.
Once you’ve gone through this straightforward process and quantified your business’ risk, you can next move to the construction or retrofit of your data center. You know the extent of the protection you need. “Look at your risk considerations and apply the standard as to mitigate those risks, reduce those risks to an acceptable level. That’s what safety engineering, fire protection engineering, is all about,” says Wysocki.
Designing Your Data Island
Thinking of your data center as a data island is absolutely correct says Wysocki.
Your data should be separate from other sections of your building, especially any hazardous areas, and surrounded by fire-resistant construction, according to NFPA 75. That construction should be capable of providing resistance from fire for at least one hour. That construction should include the ceiling, doors, and the floor. Windows should be fire-rated or have a fire-rated shutter. Air ducts should also have automatic fire and smoke dampers where they pass through fire-rated construction. The temptation is to put the data center in the basement, but the possibility of a fire on an upper floor makes such a location undesirable, the standard says.
“The separation from other spaces is very important. Having a fire-resistant barrier around the space and even separating large data storage rooms from the equipment room is an important recommendation,” says Ralph Transue, senior consultant for Rolf Jensen & Associates and current chair of the NFPA 75 committee.
Top of the line data centers have a main disconnection switch that allows for the shutdown of power and HVAC and closes all smoke dampers. That main switch should be located near the exit doors.
The ideal, of course, is for a company to have a data island that is protected and furnished with its own utilities. “Very often it’s not that way,” says Wysocki. “Someone may decide they are going to rent part of the 94th floor of the Sears Tower and put in a data center. You may not have the ideal conditions in there, but you do the best you can to apply the standard and make the appropriate modification to the structure’s fire resistance and isolation of air handling systems,” he says.
Furnishings should be fire-resistant or even made of metal. No exposed plastics are permitted by the standard. If you have a raised floor, it should be made of noncombustible material, the space underneath the floor must be accessible, and the floor should have provisions for drainage (in case of fire wherein the sprinklers discharge).
Fire Protection Should Complement Your Goals
To design the safest data center, get all the key organizations in the same room talking to each other, says Rawson. “You have the brick and mortar infrastructure people and then you have the software applications people. If they’re not talking to each other and on the same page, you could design a data center and have a production center that is really inadequate just two years down the road,” he says.
“You have to have a very good idea of where you are going as an industry as well as an organization. Understand what your information technology needs are going to be, then match the infrastructure with the fire protection to complement it,” says Rawson.
Related Information From Dell.com: The Smarter Path to Tackling Power and Cooling Issues
