On the upside, the server room isn’t on fire.

This is not the correct way to mix servers and water based fire suppressant.

One of our customers does embedded development and have some custom servers in their office as a build platform. This is hardware specific to the embedded designs they’re working on and they can’t locate it in a data centre as they require regular human attention. Unstable development drivers cause crashes and the root flash filesystems need to be re-imaged and replaced.

Recently they’ve moved office and their new office has a ‘server room’, ideal for putting their very expensive custom kit in, and a handful of other machines that they keep locally in the office. While doing the fit out, they noticed that their ‘server room’ is attached to the main sprinkler system. A fire in the building and whilst the bread may be saved from being overly toasted, their expensive hand built development boards are drowned.

They raised this with their landlords who billed them the best part of a thousand pounds to resolve the problem, see the picture on the right.

I’m not sure if it’s the belief that the plastic roof will help, the combustible struts to hold it up or the lack of guttering that really emphasises the mismatch between what a landlord things a server room looks like and what a real data centre actually provides.

We’re in further discussions to see if we can host their custom kit too, because our server room has non computer damaging halon as a fire suppressant and we will return the servers to them unwashed. If your office server room looks like this, please get in touch at sales@mythic-beasts.com.