Intumescent Fire Pillows
Today I want to talk about pillows you can find in a Datacentre. Those are not pillows for tired Engineers and Technicians😉 They are for your and the building inventory safety.
A DC is built with the idea of compartmentalisation in mind. This thought starts with providing High Availability to your services, and it involves safety and fire suppression systems as well. Everything in a DC should be fireproof. That’s why wall, floors, ceiling and doors are built from fireproof materials. The idea is to stop the fire from spreading from room to room. What does a DC consist of? You’re right — network equipment and cables. Tens of thousands of cables are running inside a DC, connecting every possible network kit. These cables run through cable ducts. Those are big holes in compartment floors and walls across trunk routes. We have to stop the fire from spreading through those walls as well. You can’t effectively seal those holes with concrete or other heavy fireproof material. Tens of cables are being added to those cable trunk routes every day. It would be best if you used something portable, something easy to move and reorganise.
And here we come to the Intumescent Fire Pillows. These are easy and light “bricks” you stick tightly between penetrating services (cables) and the wall. Under fire conditions, the pillows expand several times their original volume to form an effective seal around service penetrations. The Fire Pillows provide up to 4 hours of fire protection.
The best thing about those pillows is — that they are a dry, clean, simple to install solution. And you can take it easily apart when you need to run additional cables through the wall.
