Delhi data centre fire may have destroyed equipment worth hundreds of crores
While no loss of life was reported, key network routers and servers belonging to local providers and big tech companies were damaged.Fires at data centres, where multiple companies bring their own equipment for “co-location,” are rare. Industry best practices typically require facilities to douse fires with inert gas systems, and data centres usually have limited on-site presence of people during their day-to-day operations. Those safeguards, however, may not have been enough at ST Telemedia GDC’s facility, which operated out of a building owned by Tata Communications Ltd. STT GDC has “leased the premises,” Tata Communications said in a stock exchange filing on Friday.Blaze spreadsAt least two local networks The Hindu spoke with found themselves cut off from the internet at around 2.30 a.m. The Delhi Fire Service said it received its first call regarding the blaze on the third floor of the building at 2.45 a.m., adding it reached the spot at 2:49 a.m. The fire started in the battery room on the third-floor and was categorised “Make 4,” denoting a massive blaze, DFS Assistant Divisional Officer Y.S. Meena said.“At approximately 2:30 a.m., we got a call from our team that the network was totally down,” said Sanjay Singh of R2 Net, a local internet provider. Another ISP saidthat its network went down around the same time. “Normally, they use some type of gas for firefighting, but the stock they had was not enough,” Mr. Singh claimed.STT GDC, which is in the process of being acquired by investment firm KKR and Singaporean telecom operator Singtel, said in a statement to The Hindu that “Delhi Fire Services personnel were on site at approximately 02:45 hours.”“Based on our preliminary assessment, the primary impact is limited to customers in one data hall,” an STT GDC spokesperson said. “The incident remains under review, and it would be premature to comment on the cause at this stage.”Video footage shared by one client and reviewed by The Hindu showed equipment in a server room completely blackened and charred as three fire tenders were seen standing outside the building. Ten tenders were deployed overall, and the firefighting operation lasted several hours, even though the damage was eventually confined to the third floor. Two firefighters were injured during the operation. A local policeman said prima facie, it seemed that the fire was caused by a short circuit.Data loss“On one floor, there are about 200 racks of servers,” Mr. Singh said, adding, “Fifty of those racks belonged to Google. They have an independent cage on the left side of the third floor. (Google did not respond to a request for a comment) We are a small operator, but we have lost ₹2 crore worth of equipment.” While Netflix also had infrastructure at the data centre, its Open Connect architecture may have insulated it from shocks, as caches are deployed directly within many ISPs’ local networks.Raunak Maheshwari, country head of Megaport Ltd, which runs internet exchanges for content and service providers at the facility, said the losses extended to data that may be irrecoverable. His own accounting-software vendor kept its data servers on the third floor, he said.Asked about an estimate that losses could at least be around ₹500 crore, Mr. Maheshwari said that equipment losses alone could run into hundreds of crores, given the facility’s size. “The cost of the data, who knows that?” he said. STT GDC declined to comment on the commercial value of the damaged equipment, but said some customers’ servers had been safely migrated.One ISP said it was able to restart operations on June 8 after rerouting traffic through equipment on other floors.
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