Data Centers

Mission Critical Protection

Data processing centers use electronic equipment to manipulate large amounts of data, often fed into the system from paper (payments, orders) and printed onto paper (invoices, statements). Whether your business is data (banking, insurance, brokerage), or whether data processing is essential to your business operation (airline reservations, utility billing, chain store inventory management), the data center is critical to your business’s mission, and vital to the continued productivity and profitability of your company.

Despite the low occurrence of fires in data processing facilities, the risk continues to increase as computers and disk drives become faster and denser, requiring more power and generating more heat. High volume paper handling creates its own fire hazard. Uninterruptible power systems and their storage batteries pose an additional fire risk.

While many companies rely on sprinklers as the only fire protection in their data centers, a risk assessment reveals:

Sprinklers are designed to (and are very effective at) protecting the building structure, but not your assets.
Sprinklers need significant heat to operate, requiring a full flaming fire, destroying assets (i.e., computers and other electronic equipment) at the source of the fire.
Assets surrounding the fire suffer collateral damage from water and smoke, with smoke contamination often destroying electronic equipment quite a distance away from the incident.
The cost of business interruption, including software recovery and clean up is often significantly more than the cost of the asset destroyed in the fire.
Downtime costs can be enormous… revenue per hour has been estimated to be $1.5M in financial services; $1.2M in insurance; and $1.0M in banking.

Fenwal Protection Systems and its worldwide network of factory-trained distributors can provide you with the best waterless fire protection system for your data center, to minimize business interruption caused by fire. Our innovative products to protect mission critical facilities include:

Clean Agent Suppression Systems

can snuff out a fire in seconds. Fenwal clean agents are people-safe, environmentally responsible, and do not damage sensitive electronic equipment. They minimize fire-related downtime and clean-up costs, leaving no watery mess or powdery residue, making them perfectly suited for protecting data centers.

High Sensitivity Smoke Detection Systems

can provide the earliest possible warning in a potential fire situation. Fenwal HSSD^® is able to detect plasticizers released by overheating electrical equipment, before any significant smoke is visible. As an air-sampling smoke detector, it provides superior performance in the highly air-conditioned environment found in data centers.

Intelligent Detection and Control Systems

combine detection and suppression capabilities into a single integrated fire protection system. The FenwalNET™ control panel and SmartOne™ intelligent detectors provide worry-free automatic fire protection system for your data center, or the entire facility.