[Beowulf] urgent: cost of fire suppression?

[John Hearns]

Tim, the water mist type systems looked interesting - and are claimed to do
no damage.

There is also a university HPC data centre in a rival city to yours not far
away, where the server room has argon injected to keep the oxygen level
below the point where combustion is not supported.
You can work in the server room, but are not allowed to be alone in the
building.
I worked in there many years ago.

On 19 April 2016 at 23:55, Lux, Jim (337C) <james.p.lux at jpl.nasa.gov> wrote:

> 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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