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Maxnod data center in France burns down, battery system thought to be at fault
It's not clear if data has been lost, but the facility appears to be destroyed
A data center operated by Maxnod has suffered a devastating fire, bringing the French facility offline and severely damaging infrastructure.
There are no reports of casualties or injuries. Update: One firefighter is believed to have been minorly injured.
Local government Ain said that the fire at the Saint-Trivier-sur-Moignans required significant resources, with about 81 firefighters and 49 vehicles mobilized.
Freelance network engineer and president of telco association MilkyWan, Hugues Voiturier, was at the data center when it caught fire at around 11 am local time.
anyone got impact?
Thanked by 1mrTom
Comments
Didn't someone post this?
Honestly I might be wrong
Nvm I think it was in the BuyVM dc
Interesting fire safety standards in France for datacenters. Where was no oxygen supression system? Anyway, disaster recovery buttons should be pressed.
i am searching this news too here, no one seems to post about maxnod
Since when has BuyVM France as location? Don‘t spread false info.
He meant Discord by "dc".
He never said BuyVM had presence in France.
FarmDC?
thanks
Wooden floors?
What happened with fire safety audit of that DC? I wondering if the auditor was pissed on free or paid by DC company lunch wine 🤔
Dang, that's burnt to the ground. I hope they can recover from that, never fun to see that.
Wonder what type of battery pack was the cause, and if that was the root cause.
As for fire audit -> When things start really burning, everything you have prebuilt is just to delay so people can get to safety. Small fires can be suppressed, but if you have a battery back going off NOTHING will stop that from burning to the ground. You have to dunk it in salt or sand, container of fire suppression foam and it will still burn. Water can even accelerate.
If you get aluminium or magnesium burning, water accelerates. Combo of iron + aluminium is called thermite as well. If metals ignite you are completely SOL.
Also if you get electrical burn (ie. insulation cover melts), nothing but a breaker tripping can stop that from happening.
These types of fires are nothing like your ordinary fire. I've seen some kids burned some plastic in the woods, they ran off before i got there, and i only noticed due to glimmer of light. I used co2 fire suppresser and it took surprisingly a lot, but because it was plastic in the woods, firefighters still had to come around and check that it's really out.
Even the firesafety course doesn't prep you for a real off the rails fire, since what is used for the practice purpose isn't anything nasty for humans, i think they just used wood, and it was in a barrel so 100% of your suppressant would get in there. Rather cold too so easy to put out.
DC firesafety is especially expensive, Halon costs here like 20k € per 30kg bottle (if i recall correctly from another DC operator who bought 6 or 8 of these ...), and you need a lot of them. You need to test fire one as well. If halon is triggered people are SOL if they are still inside since no oxygen, no breathing. You have seconds to GTFO.
Foams etc. ruin everything plasticcy completely, but there is a new foam which does not but again VERY expensive.
Co2 is cheap, and will cause cooling too, but i think it's too ineffectual for DCs because Halon is picked, i am not sure of the specifics.
For our next DC we have to pick something, i am leaning strongly towards Co2, but issue is that our airflow is so huge that it's probably not going to be very effective. It's like 1k € per bottle. To work against that airflow, we might need just way too much, so we might have to go with thermal fuses per rack, or even per 1RU + trust the giant airflow handles it, and a small automatic firesuppresser per electric cabin.
This maxnod thing makes me think that maybe we should forgo all batteries anywhere near the production rooms. I was even thinking of having rack level.
We need to find out what type of batter ypacks they were, LiFePo4 is supposed to be almost as safe as lead acid.