How to Prevent Data Center Fires: Lessons from the Biggest Incidents?

Datacenter fires, though relatively rare, can have catastrophic consequences. From endangering lives to causing millions in damages and prolonged downtime, these incidents underscore the importance of robust safety measures and disaster recovery plans. However, due to concerns about non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and public relations (PR), many organizations are reluctant to share detailed reports about such incidents. This lack of transparency can hinder the industry’s ability to learn from past mistakes and implement preventive measures.

According to the Uptime Institute, high-profile data center outages caused by fires or fire suppression systems occurred between 2020 and early 2023. While fires account for a small percentage of data center incidents, their potential impact on business continuity and customer trust cannot be ignored.

Notable Data Center Fires: Key Takeaways

  1. Google Data Center Fire, Iowa (2022)
    An arc flash in a substation near Google’s Council Bluffs data center caused an explosion, injuring three workers. Although unrelated to the simultaneous outage of Google’s maps and search services, the incident highlighted the risks associated with electrical infrastructure.
  2. Evocative Data Center Fire, New Jersey (2023)
    A fire in the UPS area of Evocative’s Secaucus facility required a full power shutdown. Fortunately, no injuries were reported, but the incident disrupted services for many New York metro area companies.
  3. OVHcloud Data Center Fire, France (2021)
    A catastrophic fire destroyed one of OVHcloud’s Strasbourg data centers and damaged another. The incident underscored the importance of compartmentalization and redundant infrastructure to limit fire spread and ensure service continuity.
  4. SK Inc. C&C Fire, South Korea (2021)
    A fire at SK C&C’s data center disrupted Kakao Corporation’s services for hours, exposing gaps in its disaster recovery plan. The incident led to establishing a recurrence prevention committee to address vulnerabilities.
  5. Reliance Jio, India (2024)

Reliance, a large telecom company, Reliance Jio, had a significant network outage on Tuesday (September 17).

According to the outage monitoring website Downdetector, over 10,000 customers reported not receiving signals, experiencing issues with JioFiber, and accessing mobile internet.

Confirming the situation, a Jio representative told Reuters, “This morning, certain Jio users in Mumbai had trouble accessing smooth services due to minor technical difficulties. The issue has been rectified, and Jio’s seamless services are entirely restored. We apologize for the disruption to our subscribers.

Building Resilience: Preventing Data Center Fires

Datacenter fires can result from various causes, including arc flashes, faulty infrastructure, hardware failures, and human error. While some incidents are unavoidable, many can be prevented through proactive measures.

  • Infrastructure Safety: Regular inspections, maintenance, and upgrades of electrical and mechanical systems are critical. Compartmentalization can help contain fires and prevent them from spreading.
  • Compliance and Regulation: Stronger compliance standards, such as Colorado’s Federal Data Center Enhancement Act and Maryland’s Critical Infrastructure Streamlining Act, ensure infrastructure resilience.
  • Disaster Recovery Plans: A well-defined disaster recovery plan, including risk assessment, redundant infrastructure, and backup power generators, can minimize downtime and protect data.

The Role of ESDS in Ensuring Business Continuity

At ESDS, we understand the importance of safeguarding your data and ensuring uninterrupted operations. Our state-of-the-art data centers are designed with resilience in mind, incorporating advanced fire suppression systems, redundant power supplies, and robust disaster recovery protocols. We also offer comprehensive disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) to help businesses quickly restore operations during a catastrophic event.

Staying Ahead of the Curve

Disaster recovery plans are not static documents but living frameworks that must evolve with your business and technology. Krista Shepard of Cologix aptly said, “It’s important to periodically update and refine disaster recovery plans as your business and technology evolve and to adapt to changing environmental and weather conditions.”

At ESDS, we are committed to helping businesses stay ahead of the curve by providing cutting-edge solutions and expert guidance. Whether you want to enhance your data center’s resilience or develop a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, we’ve got you covered.

Conclusion

Datacenter fires may be rare, but their potential impact is too significant to ignore. By learning from past incidents, investing in infrastructure safety, and implementing robust disaster recovery plans, businesses can protect their operations, safeguard their customers’ trust, and ensure long-term success.


ESDS delivers secure, scalable, and resilient data center solutions tailored to your business needs. From disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) to advanced fire suppression systems, our cutting-edge technologies ensure your data is always protected. Partner with ESDS to build a future-proof infrastructure that guarantees business continuity, no matter what challenges arise.

Contact us today to learn how we can help you stay ahead in an ever-evolving digital landscape.

Data Center Cooling in 2025: Emerging Trends and Strategic Approaches for Efficiency

As we enter 2025, data center services are in a position to adopt various new cooling technologies and techniques. These range from quite mature and proven solutions to much more experimental ones. Yet, they are bound to influence data center cooling trends in 2025 as enterprises look for even more cost-effective and sustainable methods of cooling facilities.

Below are the key statistics for the Data center shown below:

Here are the six key data center cooling trends in the new year:

  • Rising Data Center Heat Challenges

The most critical data center services cooling trend impacting the sector in 2025 is increased demand for cooling systems. This is due primarily to the ongoing deployment of AI workloads, which tend to generate more heat than traditional applications.

In 2025 and beyond, finding ways to improve data center cooling won’t simply be about saving money or reducing carbon emissions. Ensuring facilities can accommodate AI without overheating will also become critical.

  • Increased Adoption of Liquid Cooling

One way to dissipate heat more effectively is to replace traditional air coolers with liquid cooling systems. These may include immersion cooling, which covers equipment in non-conductive liquid, an extremely efficient but costly cooling method, and direct-to-chip cooling, which transfers heat directly from chips.

Liquid cooling systems are generally much more expensive than traditional cooling solutions, and they can be challenging to retrofit into existing facilities. However, according to IDC, 22% of data centers already have liquid cooling systems. Expect that figure to grow in the new year as data center operators respond to contend with the added heat load of AI and leverage innovations designed to make liquid cooling more efficient and reliable, such as a novel propylene glycol-based direct-to-chip cooling fluid recently unveiled by Castor.

  • Low-Cost Cooling System Improvements

Another way to improve the effectiveness of data center cooling is to optimize the chilled-air systems many facilities already have. Simple, inexpensive improvements like optimizing the positioning of fans or sealing off space that doesn’t need to be cooled to avoid blowing air into it can deliver essential boosts in cooling system capabilities.

Measures like these won’t typically result in triple-digit performance improvements. Still, they may boost cooling capacity by 10-20%—which could be enough to allow facilities to support heat-intensive AI workloads without requiring brand-new cooling systems. We expect these improvements to become another data center cooling trend in the new year.

  • Creative Heat Reuse Strategies

In addition to the need to dissipate more heat, part of the pressure data center operators face on the cooling front currently centers on sustainability. To reduce overall carbon emissions, facilities must reduce the energy they waste through heat dissipation.

Newer, more efficient cooling technologies (such as liquid cooling, which we mentioned above) are one way to do this. But another strategy is to repurpose the heat that cooling systems pump out of data centers. Communities can reuse heat in homes, for example—or, more creatively, heat swimming pools or grow plants.

Heat reuse practices like these are already underway. As businesses focus on data center sustainability, expect to see more of them in 2025.

  • Cooling System Analytics

To optimize your data center cooling system, you must first identify its weaknesses. This is where cooling system sensors and data analytics come in. By collecting and analyzing data such as the temperature within various parts of a data center, operators can determine which equipment runs hotter than it should. They can also find instances where cooling systems remove more heat than necessary, which could signify wasted cooling capacity and energy.

Sensor-based temperature monitoring and analytics in data centers is not a new practice. However, advancements in AI technology have made it easier than ever to process this data and identify optimization opportunities based on it. Therefore, we’ll likely see more and more investment in this cooling system analytics in 2025.

  • Higher Target Temperatures in Data Centers

Traditionally, data center operators have aimed to keep server room temperatures below. However, some data center companies have begun experimenting with somewhat higher temperatures in their server rooms, and they’re reporting success. By increasing target temperatures to the higher 70s, they can reduce the load on cooling systems without experiencing overheating events for IT equipment.

While it’s essential to ensure that servers can tolerate higher temperatures before adopting this practice, this is another low-cost way to improve cooling capacity and reduce energy use, which is why I suspect we’ll see more data center operators adopting this tactic in the new year.

Conclusion

ESDS leads the industry by providing innovative, cutting-edge data center cooling solutions developed with current market requirements. Using liquid cooling technology, ESDS helps data center operators shift from conventional air cooling to a far more efficient and sustainable option.

Data Center Services for Growth Enhancing Scalability and Security

Data consumption has significantly increased due to the large increase in digital adoption across industries, which has strengthened India’s economic growth. The current economic boom shows how businesses are becoming more and more reliant on virtual solutions, which makes robust data centers necessary. Future growth in this need for data will drive advancements in the existing state of data infrastructure, which must address security, scalability, and performance issues brought on by today’s new workloads.

Data Center Market Growth Revenue in 2024

According to Statista, the data center business is predicted to earn $8.65 billion in sales by 2024.
The market is led by network infrastructure, which is estimated to reach $5.93 billion by 2024. Revenue is expected to rise at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.50% by 2029, with a market volume of $11.85 billion. Globally, the United States will generate the majority of revenue (US$123.20 billion by 2024).

Overview of Data Center in India

In both developed and emerging nations, the data center sector has grown significantly. This is because businesses are becoming more ready to spend money on new infrastructure for data deployment and storage. In the age of digitalization, the data center industry in India is expanding rapidly. The country is well-positioned to become a global hub for data centers, especially those focused on cloud computing, and has a bright future ahead.

The top seven cities in India now have data centers with a combined capacity of 977 MW, according to a survey by Cushman & Wakefield. It is anticipated that India’s data center capacity will increase significantly in the future. By 2028, the capacity expansions now under development are predicted to reach 1.03 GW.

ESDS Major Player in the Indian Data Center Market

ESDS Colocation Services provides enterprises with cutting-edge data center capabilities, ensuring 99.995% uptime with 2N+1 redundant UPS systems and controlled diesel generators. Clients benefit from two Power Distribution Units for accurate monitoring and remote management via KVM-IP, as well as scalable power solutions ranging from 4KW to 40KW rack. Advanced safety features include precise air conditioning, VESDA smoke detection, and fire suppression. Additional advantages include no-cost installations, proactive monitoring, and performance assessments, which ensure ongoing peak performance and business continuity.

Cloud Integration: Enhancing Flexibility and Scalability

Cloud computing is revolutionizing the IT infrastructure of most businesses. It brings high-quality integration services to the data centers, allowing all organizations to connect their in-house systems with cloud environments simply. Integration services offered by these enable companies to be flexible in how they handle workloads and scale resources on demand without heavily investing in physical data center servers.

Hybrid clouds are currently becoming more prominent in the enterprise world simply because they offer the best of both worlds – namely, private and public clouds. This model provides an opportunity for enterprises to handle sensitive workloads on the private clouds while enjoying the economies and scalability benefits of public cloud resources. This integrated environment helps IT professionals reallocate workloads dynamically, optimize resource utilization, and, hence, enhance overall efficiency.

Data Center Security: Ensuring Protection and Compliance

As corporations increasingly store sensitive data, data center security is taking a huge chunk of focus. Data breaches, cyberattacks, and regulatory compliance are cited by C-level executives as the most significant reasons why data security remains pivotal in the management of a data center.

A better data center provider has a strict type of physical and digital security implementation to protect data and IT infrastructure. Physical would include general surveillance 24/7, biometric access controls, and also redundancy in power and cooling systems to ensure no downtime. The digital involves advanced firewall systems, intrusion detection, encryption, and continuous monitoring. Only these will quickly identify threats so that there is faster neutralization.

Any reliable data center provider must adhere to industry standards like ISO 27001, SOC 2, or GDPR. These requirements ensure that the operations of a data center are stringent regarding security and that their customer’s data is delivered with the utmost care. Besides, secured data transmission over the Internet and proper policies of network security always help to reduce the risks associated with cyberattacks or data breaches.

Colocation Services: Optimizing IT Infrastructure

One of the best solutions for organizations that want to reduce their capital expenditures without controlling their IT infrastructure is colocation services. Colocation allows companies to maintain their servers and all their associated hardware within a third-party data center, thereby enabling them to access world-class facilities devoid of the sunk costs or maintenance costs of a company’s data centers.

Colocation allows an organization to use the infrastructure of the data center, be it in the form of robust power supplies or cooling systems and high-speed network connections, while retaining ownership of its hardware. This approach also allows for the flexibility of growing up in response to changes within the needs of the business without requiring any other investment in physical space or resources.

Disaster Recovery Solutions: Safeguarding Business Continuity

Business continuity is aimed at recovery from unexpected disruptions, and disaster recovery services from data centers help protect organizations against data loss to help the business regain normalcy after a disaster.

Disaster recovery as a service encompasses strong solutions like automated backup, real-time replication, and geographic redundancy. Data centers adopt both recovery point objectives—which measure how much data could be lost if the failure happens—and recovery time objectives—which outline how quickly systems should recover to their operational power. These metrics determine that businesses will operate with minimum downtime, so the disasters will have little revenue impact and customer satisfaction.

Conclusion

Today, no business can afford to overlook robust data center services, be it cloud integration, data center security, colocation, or disaster recovery. It is thus advisable that businesses select a reliable data center provider and maintain agility, security, and resilience. A scalable, secure, and efficient IT infrastructure will be pivotal to growth in the not-too-distant future.

Find out how ESDS data centers in India are changing the game for business resilience and scalability with cloud integration, security, colocation, and disaster recovery solutions. India Ka Apna Cloud-powering, the cutting-edge technology offered by ESDS, gets to the very specific needs of Indian businesses: this uniquely catered requirement ensures compliance, data sovereignty, and higher security.