Why a fire that didn't touch the data halls still took the facility offline
Inside the NorthC outage in Almere, and how data centres fight fire.
Last week, a fire at a NorthC data centre in Almere, Netherlands, took the entire facility offline. The fire didn't even touch the data halls. Here's why.
What happened
The fire started at Almere Data Centre last Thursday. The blaze hit "technical facilities" at the rear of the three-storey facility and was put out by Friday.
The 11MW data centre is owned by Keppel DC REIT and leased to NorthC, which then leases it to various clients. NorthC manages more than 20 data centres in the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland.
From various reports, affected organisations include IBM Cloud, Utrecht University, and public transportation provider Transdev.
Why power was cut
The fire occurred in a section that houses support infrastructure, not in the data halls. At the time, one concern was the diesel storage tanks holding around a million litres of fuel underground nearby.
As a precaution, the fire department asked for the power supply to be cut. Without power, servers in the data halls were not operable.
Initial reports said recovery would take up to 72 hours, but this was pushed back, with operations now expected to resume around Wednesday. The exact cause of the fire has not yet been determined.
How data centres fight fire
Data centres take very different approaches when it comes to fighting fires. Due to the expensive electronics, a major part of the strategy hinges on early detection.
Some data centres use gas suppression systems instead of water to displace oxygen or interrupt the fire reaction. Indeed, Almere Data Centre uses a fire prevention system that lowers oxygen concentration with nitrogen, according to a NorthC fact sheet I saw.
It's also worth noting that lithium-ion batteries, increasingly used in data centres (though not here), cannot be extinguished by gas suppression alone.
