26 ms·

Easy to see now that a lightly constructed five story cube might not be a fully fire proof.

by ilkkao 6y ago

Biganon 6y ago
How do you see that?
mike_d 6y ago
Would you humor us with a link to a fully fire proof datacenter?
- verytrivial 6y ago
  From the outside (and from a position lacking all inside knowledge) it looks highly interconnected and very well ventilated. I'm not sure where you'd put a inert gas supression system or beefy firewalls to slow the fire progress.
- dividedbyzero 6y ago
  I think Microsoft had some experimental datacenter containers they submerged in the northern Atlantic for passive cooling, and I believe those were filled with an inert gas as well. I guess that would come very close to an actual fireproof datacenter.
  - reasonabl_human 6y ago
    Yep you’re right, learning about this was part of some onboarding training we had to complete... it was an interesting proof of concept, but finding the right people to maintain the infra with both IT and Scuba skills was a narrow niche to nail down ;)
    - potemkinhr 6y ago
      I don't opening it at any point before decomissioning it completely is even an afterthought with that. They just write off any failures and roll with it as long as it's viable.
      - reasonabl_human 6y ago
        Yeah that was one of the show-stopping issues, inability to repair / hotswap etc...
        namibj 6y ago
        Well, you only need to get shared infrastructure reliable enough that you can afford to not design it with repair in mind. The cloud servers are already design without unit-level maintenance work in mind, which saves money by eliminating rails and similar. They get populated racks from the factory and just cart them from the dock to their place, plug them in (maybe run some self-test to make sure there are no loose connectors or so), and eventually decommission them after some years.
- paco3346 6y ago
  Newly constructed datacenters in the US tend to be all metal with a full building clean suppression agent. https://www.fike.com/products/ecaro-25-clean-agent-fire-suppression/ https://www.fike.com/products/ecaro-25-clean-agent-fire-supp... I used to work for a provider whose 2 main datacenters of 8k+ sq ft could pull all oxygen out of the building in 60 seconds.
  - Twirrim 6y ago
    Data centres I used to work in back in the early 2000s had argonite gas dumps in place (prior to argonite, halon used to be popular but is an ozone depleting gas so was phased out) In the case of a fire, it would dump a lot of argonite gas in and consume a large amount of the oxygen in the room, depriving the fire of fuel. It's also safe and leaves minimal clean-up work afterwards, doesn't harm electronics etc. unlike sprinklers and the like. The amount of oxygen left is sufficient for human life, but not for fires, though my understanding is that it can be quite unpleasant when it happens. You won't want to hang around.
    - namibj 6y ago
      Well, yeah, these normal inert gas fire suppression systems don't do a good job if humans can still breathe. The Novec 1230 based ones can actually be sufficiently effective for typical flammability properties you can cheaply adhere to in a datacenter, but even then you iirc would want to add both that and some extra oxygen, because the nitrogen in the air is much more effective at suffocating humans than at suffocating fire. This stuff is just a really, really heavy gas that's liquid below about body temperature (boils easily though), and the heat capacity of gasses is mostly proportional to their density. Flames are extinguished by this cooling effect (identical to water in that regard), but humans rely on catalytic processes that aren't affected by the cooling effect. If you could keep the existing oxygen inside, while adding Novec 1230, humans could continue to breathe while the flames would still be extinguished, but this would require the building/room to be a pressure chamber that holds about half an atmosphere of extra pressure. I'm pretty sure just blowing in some extra oxygen with the Novec 1230 would be far cheaper to do safely and reliably. I mean, in principle, if you gave re-breathers to the workers and have some airlocks, you could afford to keep that atmosphere permanently, but it'd have to be a bit warm (~30 C I'd guess). Don't worry, the air would be breathable, but long-term it'd probably be unhealthy to breathe in such high concentrations and humans breathing would slightly pollute the atmosphere (CO2 can't stay if it's supposed to remain breathable). Just to be clear: in an effective argonite extinguishing system you'd have about a minute or two until you pass out and need to be dragged out, ideally get oxygen, get ventilated (no brain, no breathing) and potentially also be resuscitated (the heart stops shortly after your brain from a lack of oxygen, so if you're ventilated fast enough, it never stops and you wake up a few externally-forced breaths later). Having an oxygen bottle to supplement your breaths would fix that problem for as long as it's not empty.

Easy to see now that a lightly constructed five story cube might not be a fully fire proof.

by ilkkao 6y ago

Easy to see now that a lightly constructed five story cube might not be a fully fire proof.

Biganon 6y ago

How do you see that?

mike_d 6y ago

Would you humor us with a link to a fully fire proof datacenter?

verytrivial 6y ago
From the outside (and from a position lacking all inside knowledge) it looks highly interconnected and very well ventilated. I'm not sure where you'd put a inert gas supression system or beefy firewalls to slow the fire progress.
dividedbyzero 6y ago
I think Microsoft had some experimental datacenter containers they submerged in the northern Atlantic for passive cooling, and I believe those were filled with an inert gas as well. I guess that would come very close to an actual fireproof datacenter.
- reasonabl_human 6y ago
  Yep you’re right, learning about this was part of some onboarding training we had to complete... it was an interesting proof of concept, but finding the right people to maintain the infra with both IT and Scuba skills was a narrow niche to nail down ;)
  - potemkinhr 6y ago
    I don't opening it at any point before decomissioning it completely is even an afterthought with that. They just write off any failures and roll with it as long as it's viable.
    - reasonabl_human 6y ago
      Yeah that was one of the show-stopping issues, inability to repair / hotswap etc...
      - namibj 6y ago
        Well, you only need to get shared infrastructure reliable enough that you can afford to not design it with repair in mind. The cloud servers are already design without unit-level maintenance work in mind, which saves money by eliminating rails and similar. They get populated racks from the factory and just cart them from the dock to their place, plug them in (maybe run some self-test to make sure there are no loose connectors or so), and eventually decommission them after some years.
paco3346 6y ago
Newly constructed datacenters in the US tend to be all metal with a full building clean suppression agent. https://www.fike.com/products/ecaro-25-clean-agent-fire-suppression/ https://www.fike.com/products/ecaro-25-clean-agent-fire-supp... I used to work for a provider whose 2 main datacenters of 8k+ sq ft could pull all oxygen out of the building in 60 seconds.
- Twirrim 6y ago
  Data centres I used to work in back in the early 2000s had argonite gas dumps in place (prior to argonite, halon used to be popular but is an ozone depleting gas so was phased out) In the case of a fire, it would dump a lot of argonite gas in and consume a large amount of the oxygen in the room, depriving the fire of fuel. It's also safe and leaves minimal clean-up work afterwards, doesn't harm electronics etc. unlike sprinklers and the like. The amount of oxygen left is sufficient for human life, but not for fires, though my understanding is that it can be quite unpleasant when it happens. You won't want to hang around.
  - namibj 6y ago
    Well, yeah, these normal inert gas fire suppression systems don't do a good job if humans can still breathe. The Novec 1230 based ones can actually be sufficiently effective for typical flammability properties you can cheaply adhere to in a datacenter, but even then you iirc would want to add both that and some extra oxygen, because the nitrogen in the air is much more effective at suffocating humans than at suffocating fire. This stuff is just a really, really heavy gas that's liquid below about body temperature (boils easily though), and the heat capacity of gasses is mostly proportional to their density. Flames are extinguished by this cooling effect (identical to water in that regard), but humans rely on catalytic processes that aren't affected by the cooling effect. If you could keep the existing oxygen inside, while adding Novec 1230, humans could continue to breathe while the flames would still be extinguished, but this would require the building/room to be a pressure chamber that holds about half an atmosphere of extra pressure. I'm pretty sure just blowing in some extra oxygen with the Novec 1230 would be far cheaper to do safely and reliably. I mean, in principle, if you gave re-breathers to the workers and have some airlocks, you could afford to keep that atmosphere permanently, but it'd have to be a bit warm (~30 C I'd guess). Don't worry, the air would be breathable, but long-term it'd probably be unhealthy to breathe in such high concentrations and humans breathing would slightly pollute the atmosphere (CO2 can't stay if it's supposed to remain breathable). Just to be clear: in an effective argonite extinguishing system you'd have about a minute or two until you pass out and need to be dragged out, ideally get oxygen, get ventilated (no brain, no breathing) and potentially also be resuscitated (the heart stops shortly after your brain from a lack of oxygen, so if you're ventilated fast enough, it never stops and you wake up a few externally-forced breaths later). Having an oxygen bottle to supplement your breaths would fix that problem for as long as it's not empty.