North American Network Operators Group

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Risks and reality

  • From: Sean Donelan
  • Date: Sun Apr 02 01:49:57 2000

On Thu, 30 March 2000, Nathan Stratton wrote:
> Sometimes there are not a lot of options. I work as a fire fighter and
> built one of my datacenters on the 5th floor because I had no options. I
> did make sure that it was marked out correctly because I know what it is
> like going through a building on fire. So far I have never worked a CO
> fire, but I am sure it is a mess.

Bellcore had some good videotape of CO fires.

But I wonder, do people talk to their insurance companies about the actual
level of risk?  If you look worldwide, it turns out the risk from fire in
a datacenter is about the same as the risk of a terrorist attack.  It sounds
awful, until you look a little further and find out the occurance of either
risk is very small.  Factory Mutual labels risks less than 1 incident per
1,000,000 sq/ft of insured space as "low-risk."  Fires in telecommunication
and data centers are even rarer than 1 incident per 1,000,000 sq/ft.

For the bored, the fires in telecommunications centers were extinguished
by the following, in order:

   1) extinguished by employees (49%)
   2) extinguished by firefighters (45%)
   3) extinguished by automatic fire suppression systems (6%)

There are other risks which are more likely in telecommunications and data
centers.