It’s pretty much all been said.

Halon (long gone).  Reaction sucks oxygen out of air.
FM200 (safe but being phased out).  Heard it can leave a residue despite the 
brochure saying not.
Inergen  more common (and others like it).  Fundamentally mostly nitrogen that 
drops oxygen below 15% and drops temperature.  These are two components of a 
fire (heat, fuel and oxygen).  People can operate comfortably below 15% oxygen. 
 In fact at 10% you can still function more than enough to pick up your gear 
and leave the room.

I did quite a bit of research on reduced oxygen environments (hypoxic) which is 
used on (Firepass etc.) http://www.firepass.com/oxygen-reduction-fire

Obviously dry pipe is used a lot. The issues with gas suppression today are 
more around noise (and vibration) and temp drop and they relate to spinning 
disks and circuit boards, more than people.

The issues around dry pipe is, well when it goes off, it’s not very dry and 
water/equipment certainly doesn’t mix.

Cheers

B

________________________________
From: AusNOG <ausnog-boun...@lists.ausnog.net> on behalf of Paul Wilkins 
<paulwilkins...@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2018 3:53 pm
To: AusNOG@lists.ausnog.net
Subject: [AusNOG] [AUSNog] : Re Data Centre Fire Suppression Safety

Every data centre has a fire suppression system. We're not used to thinking of 
this as a hazardous environment, but consequent totwo techs being found dead 
working on a fire suppression system in 
Antarctica<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/12/antarctica-two-technicians-dead-mcmurdo-station-ross-island>,
 I find myself wondering yet again, why there aren't more stringent controls 
around the fire suppression systems in data centres: viz - when you enter a 
data centre, how confident can you be you're not going to be quietly 
asphyxiated?

Kind regards

Paul Wilkins

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