Aspirating smoke detection (VESDA)
Fire detection that continuously draws a room's air through a network of perforated pipes and analyzes it in a laser chamber, to spot overheating well before any flame.
In a server room, airflow is strong and dilutes smoke: a ceiling spot detector may only react once the fire has taken hold, whereas the typical incident begins with a cable or a power supply slowly overheating. Aspirating detection addresses this by continuously drawing air through pipes drilled with calibrated holes, run along the ceiling, under the raised floor or in the return air ducts, and passing it through a central laser analysis chamber. Its sensitivity, far greater than that of a conventional detector, allows several successive thresholds: alert, human response, then release of suppression. The European standard EN 54-20 classifies these systems by sensitivity, Class A being the finest. The limit is that of any highly sensitive alarm: set too low, it multiplies false alarms, and the operator ends up raising the thresholds or ignoring them.
On the night of March 9 to 10, 2021, at about 12:35 a.m., fire broke out almost simultaneously in the battery room and the UPS room of OVHcloud's SBG2 building in Strasbourg. According to the investigation report that France's industrial accident investigation bureau, BEA-RI, published in June 2022, the aspirating and optical detection systems worked and quickly alerted staff, who got to safety. But the site had no automatic suppression and the power cutoff was slow: SBG2 was completely destroyed. Early detection only protects when something acts on the alarm.
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