Real estate company JLL says fire safety in data centres is under scrutiny following several more disrupting fires. A fire at Digital Reality’s Loyang Way data centre, Singapore, in September, impacted clients including Alibaba Cloud, Lazada, Bytedance. The fire started in a lithium ion battery. A fire at a data centre in India in September caused an outage for users of Reliance Jio, India’s leading telcon provider. JLL says that despite the risk of and impact of such fires, there is today no global regulatory standard for data centre fire safety. Some countries have national regulations or guidelines, but most operate under general industrial building regulations. Partitioning of UPS (power back up) systems containing lithium ion batteries is important, as is maintenance of these (the lithium ion batteries have only 15 years guarantee).
“Recent data center fires raise serious concerns about the adequacy of current fire safety measures”, JLL, 14th October 2024 https://www.us.jll.com/en/trends-and-insights/workplace/will-data-center-fires-spark-tighter-safety-rules
“Data Centers 2024 Global Outlook”, JLL report, January 2024 https://www.us.jll.com/en/trends-and-insights/research/data-center-outlook
“Fire at Loyang data centre, SCDF operations still ongoing after a day”, CAN, 10th September 2024 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/fire-loyang-digital-realty-data-centre-scdf-operation-4599316
“Fire at data centre causes India-wide outage for Reliance Jio users”, Reuters, 17th September 2024 https://www.reuters.com/world/india/reliance-jio-users-report-network-outage-across-india-downdetector-shows-2024-09-17/
See “Data centre fires a ‘significant threat’” in pinfa Newsletter n°152.