UPS fire forces full power shutdown at Secaucus data centre

What happened

An electrical failure in one of the redundant uninterruptible power supply (UPS) units at the Evocative EWR1 data centre, formerly INAP, at 1 Enterprise Avenue in Secaucus, New Jersey, United States, caused the unit to start smoking and then to start a small fire in the UPS room. The fire was contained to the UPS area and was quickly extinguished by the fire department. The fire department then cut power to the whole 105,000 sq ft facility and disabled the generators while the fire marshal and the utility verified the electrical system.

Power remained off on the fire marshal's instruction until the fire marshal and the utility approved re-energising, after the UPS units and rooms had been cleaned. No injuries were reported. Evocative provides internet connectivity to many companies in the New York metro area.

Contributing factors

Electrical failure in one of the redundant UPS units. The source does not state why the unit failed. Full site shutdown followed the fire, with power kept off until the fire marshal and utility gave approval.

Lessons learned

1. Compartmentalise UPS rooms and switchgear so that a fault in one unit cannot spread to other systems or force a whole-site shutdown.
2. Agree in advance with fire services and the utility how power is verified and restored after a fire, so re-energising is not delayed.
3. Include UPS and power-system failure scenarios in disaster recovery and customer communication plans, since a full shutdown affects every tenant at once.

More lessons on spacing, layout and fire spread, fire suppression and firefighting, outages, backup supply and restoration, from every incident on the register.

Source

datacenterknowledge.com