No, they are a major risk to the employees working there.
I would much rather have a data center destroyed by for every twenty years without victims than mandating the user of oxygen replacing fire suppressants.
Calling these agents "oxygen suppressing" is a HUGE misnomer. Halon, FM200, etc don't work by reacting with the oxygen in the room. Although displacing some oxygen contributes to their method of action, this isn't the primary way they put out fires.
Halon and friends stop fires by catalytically interrupting gaseous fire reaction products. As it was explained to me, these reactions can be counterintuitive - eg, the production of reduced hydrogen gas (H2) from free radicals. You wouldn't expect Halon to put out a fire by making hydrogen, but it does.
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- Isolate all rooms with fire-proof doors.
- Keep fire supression system at manual.
- When fire breaks try to contain (we have 24h watch).
- If fails trigger fire supression system. It has 90 second delay and activated per room.
- Leave premsises, make the calls.
BTW, We use Novec.
The usual system, e.g. in a train maintenance depot:
- Employee is going to work underneath the train, which therefore must not be moved. He isolates the power supply, and locks this isolation with his padlock.
A situation in which it's suddenly very important to reconnect the power is extremely unlikely. If the employee forgets to remove his padlock, it's disruptive but not dangerous. (I've seen this system once, and when people left for the day they were supposed to lock their padlocks on a special board as part of clocking out.)
For the datacentre, if the fire alarm goes off, everyone is supposed to leave by the nearest exit -- not go back the way they came in, unlocking their padlocks to allow the extinguishing system to be used.
Not so much in the old days :-)
I worked at palace (based at Cranfield uni) that had an experimental rig that used freon as a working fluid - we had emergency respirator sets (like the fire service uses) and people trained in them to use to rescue anyone.