What Man-made Physical Threat Could Pose Severe Danger to a Server Farm?

I am writing a novel in which a researcher attempts to work against a study he is a part of by purposely sabotaging operations on the research compound. I am wondering if the following is plausible.

"Bob" starts a small fire in the server farm containing the primary servers for data collection in the study. He has "Steve" (unaware of the sabotage) in position to put out the fire so that Bob can perform an emergency back-up of the data to the study's secondary off-site servers in case the fire spreads (the data would otherwise have been backed up at 1 a.m. like any other day). Bob does this because at this point in time he is hoping to make himself look like a hero as to not draw any suspicion for his actions later.

Does that make sense? Would a fire pose a reasonable threat in this environment? Does the premise of needing to perform an emergency data store accurately reflect something that could occur in real life?

I have a little leeway in plausibility as this is set some time in the future, but want it to still be reasonable to readers who are more informed about these matters than me.

If anyone has any suggestions for other possible (but easily resolved) physical threats, I would greatly appreciate those as well.

Thanks for your help!