A data centre fire in southern Australia disrupted numerous businesses last week, including account access among customers of UniSuper, a superannuation provider with more than AUS $56 billion in assets. Fortunately, no customer information was lost as a result of the failure and the data centre was back online a day later.

The affected data centre remains undisclosed at this time, but news reports did identify it as a facility somewhere in the Port Melbourne area. Port Melbourne is a suburb of Melbourne in the state of Victoria. News reports also indicate that the data centre is in the same general vicinity as two companies in which UniSuper is heavily invested.

No Information on Cause: At of the time of this writing, the cause of the fire remains unknown and it could be some time before that information is released. All that is known at this point is that the data centre caught fire and, in the aftermath, UniSuper and several other businesses suffered partial shut-downs. The fact that the centre resumed operation the following day indicates the fire was not as severe as it could have been. Data centres the world over are equipped with fire suppression systems in order to minimise the damage fire and smoke could cause. These are chemical or water systems that can extinguish fires without damaging computer hardware. It is assumed such a system is that which saved the Australian data centre.

Unfortunately, fire suppression systems themselves do not always work. A number of years ago, a Romanian data centre operated by ING suffered extensive damage from a fire suppression system test. The system made such a loud boom that the sound waves actually damaged hardware!

Fire Is Always a Risk: Those of us within the data centre community are fully aware that fire is always a risk. The general public, on the other hand, may not realise just how much of a problem fire can be. For starters, think about the tremendous amount of heat that data centres produce on a daily basis. Data centres have to be kept cool because excess heat can damage sensitive network hardware. But, more importantly, allowing excess heat to build up could spark a catastrophic fire. The larger a data centre is, the greater the potential for fire if cooling solutions are not designed and implemented properly. We have seen notable data centre fires all over the world in the past. In 2016, Ford experienced a fire at its US corporate headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan. A government data centre in Ottawa (Canada) also went down in 2016 after hardware suffered severe damage due to inexplicable smoke. And, of course, who can forget the 2015 fire in Azerbaijan that decimated the country's internet service. Thankfully the data centre fire in Australia was not serious enough to cause widespread damage and knock out services for an extended period. Hopefully, facility owners will identify what caused the fire and take corrective action to prevent it from occurring in the future. Source: http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/content-tracks/security-risk/australian-data-centre-fire-knocks-out-unisuper/98300.article