[Beowulf] urgent: cost of fire suppression?

Lux, Jim (337C) james.p.lux at jpl.nasa.gov
Tue Apr 19 15:55:30 PDT 2016


And really, really expensive to replace.

For just that Montreal Protocol reason.
 
Besides, you have good backups and checkpoints, right?  If your cluster
catches fire, you order up a new cluster ³from the cloud² and continue
work.  Doesn¹t Amazon deliver these with big autonomous octocopters
now?<grin>

But realistically,the need for ³non-damaging fire suppression² has gone
away for a lot of data centers, since they have to have good disaster
response plans with very fast response times compared to the 70s and 80s
when ³batch² ruled the day. Imagine if you¹re handling stock transactions,
or even something as mundane as home loans, with fairly tight time limits
and downtime requirements. The regulators aren¹t going to be interested in
your story about how you had all that Halon in your one data center, and
then a flood wiped you out.

If you¹ve got a geographically dispersed hot standby (or even just load
sharing), you can use water to put the fire out enough to save lives, and
let insurance haggle about the equipment replacement.








On 4/19/16, 1:39 PM, "Beowulf on behalf of Greg Lindahl"
<beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org on behalf of lindahl at pbm.com> wrote:

>On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 07:32:38PM +0200, Per Jessen wrote:
>
>> I thought halon gas was the usual choice for datacentres, has that gone
>> out of fashion?
>
>It was quite popular. However, it's not friendly to the ozone
>layer... which means it's phased out due to the Montreal Protocol.
>
>-- greg
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