Find work well if there's one thing that's guaranteed to reduce the availability of your I.T. systems
it's fire.
So in this episode I want it covered just a little bit of fire suppression.
Now when we talk about fire suppression that's really going to be in two very different ways.
Number one it wouldn't be a county exam without some discussion of fire extinguisher classes.
And then secondly I want to talk about fires and fire suppression within the server room.
So first of all let's go through the different classes of fire extinguishers different types of fires
the different classes of fire extinguishers.
So first we have what's called a Class A a class A fire extinguishers designed for ordinary solid combustibles
like burning wood a class B fire extinguishers designed for flammable liquids and gases.
So if you worked at the gasoline station you'd probably have a class B fire extinguisher laying around.
Number three is a Class C Class C fire extinguishers are designed for energized electrical equipment.
So if you're working with electrical equipment you need class the fire extinguishers.
Class D is for combustible metals which even sounds scary for me to even think about.
And then Class K K is for kitchens that's for oils and fats So guess which type of fire extinguisher
you need to suppress a fire in your server room or with any type of computer equipment.
That's right.
Class classy Kesey's worked out pretty good.
The only downside to a class C is when you shoot them they fire out a lot of powder.
They can be pretty messy but they're really good at stopping electrical fires.
OK let's move over to the server room now and talk about what happens in there.
The server room is going to be filled with absolutely critical systems.
So what we want to do here is we want to put out a fire.
Absolutely.
But if we can do it without destroying equipment that would be a very good thing.
So using water for example or a classy fire extinguisher with its corrosive powder could be a pretty
pretty bad thing.
So what we do is we look for alternative fire suppression materials.
Now for decades we use something called Halan.
So Halon was a great fire suppressor.
The only problem was it was not even slightly environmental friendly and we haven't seen it for many
many many years.
Today the gold standard for fire suppression in server rooms is a type of material called F.M. 200 F.M.
200 does a great job at suppressing fires.
Yet on the same token it won't destroy equipment.
And on top of that it won't mess with the environment also.
So suppressing the fire is important.
However there's other things to think about within the server room like for example you should seal
off the server room.
Now in a well-designed HVAD system the server room is all ready probably pretty well sealed.
So that's not a big deal.
However and this is where we tie into the H-back system what we'll do is often tie the H-back into a
fire suppression system so it'll simply shut the louvers and knock down the Atri a c.
So all of that if I'm 200 isn't sucked out of the room and vented out someplace.
The other thing we need to remember is we have to turn off the power and this can be a tricky one.
And again this is why we tie our fire suppression to our H-back systems because we want to be able to
bring down the systems in such a way that we don't totally destroy them.
But it has to be done very very quickly so that we can suppress the fire.
All right.
So again when it comes to fire suppression as far as I'm concerned I'm going to go out and get good
vendors who provide me good fire suppression systems and also remember for the exam FM 200 is the magic
stuff.