A silent solution

Like many manufacturers and businesses of today, Doosan understands the crucial role its IT operation plays in the successful running of its global business and has invested in active fire protection to ensure business continuity. Aware of its environmental responsibilities, Doosan selected an inert gas extinguishing system as, unlike water sprinkler systems, this delivers clean and human-safe fire protection that will not damage assets.

The challenge
Evolutionary developments in IT have meant that new, higher capacity hard disk drives can be susceptible to the sound energy associated with an extinguishing system discharge, and following loss of IT data due to an accidental discharge, Doosan wanted to ensure it was fully protected against the risk of any further incidents. It had suffered damage to its computer system when its incumbent fire system service provider accidentally released its gas extinguishant.

Donnie McCartney, Total Facilities Manager at Doosan’s Crawley site, where the event occurred, had recently been brought in to manage the site and part of his responsibility was to investigate viable solutions that would be cost-effective to implement. Senseco Systems, a Siemens Sinorix™ Extinguishing Partner, was appointed as its new service provider and Siemens worked with Senseco and Doosan to resolve the issue.

The research team at Siemens was already working on possible solutions to the problem as they were aware of incidents where competitors’ inert gas discharges had resulted in catastrophic loss. A number of these have been made public, such as the case of the WestHost SAS 70 type II data centre in Utah, where an accidental discharge of its Inergen fire extinguishing system severely damaged hundreds of its servers and data stores, affecting almost 100,000 websites and email accounts. Hardware repair and database recovery efforts put WestHost’s customers out of commission for up to six days.

The solution
Senseco, in partnership with Siemens, evaluated the installed third party systems that had caused the disruption. As a result the team concluded that the best and most cost-effective solution was to retrofit the Sinorix Silent Nozzle as this would deliver the greatest sound-reduction impact across Doosan’s business-critical environment.

The Sinorix Silent Nozzle design is able to reduce the physical sound energy in a similar way to the silencer on a car exhaust. In addition, Siemens’ R&D team has succeeded in moving the frequency of the sound away from the specific spectrum identified as crucial: a comparable example would be the methodology whereby a wind instrument changes note.

The benefit
The retrofit of the Sinorix Silent Nozzles to Doosan’s extinguishing system was a fairly simple project to undertake and they now act to safeguard the critical IT processes that the original system was installed to protect.

Donnie McCartney commented: “We were delighted with how the work proceeded. The solution couldn’t have been easier and the nozzle replacement was a quick and simple operation with no interruption to our normal daily work, which was very important for us in ensuring the continuity of our business.