[103521] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: rack power question, and a prediction about "direct heat removal" (DHR)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert E. Seastrom)
Fri Apr 4 14:36:00 2008
To: Patrick Giagnocavo <patrick@zill.net>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
From: "Robert E. Seastrom" <rs@seastrom.com>
Date: Fri, 04 Apr 2008 14:32:39 -0400
In-Reply-To: <47F5C387.3020403@zill.net> (Patrick Giagnocavo's message of "Fri, 04 Apr 2008 01:58:31 -0400")
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
Patrick Giagnocavo <patrick@zill.net> writes:
> For fire suppression, an alarm would sound and only when it can in
> some fashion be "proven" that no humans are inside the area, CO2 is
> flooded into the area and the fire goes out. Some form of ducting
> which mixes the CO2 with regular air and exhausts it is needed after
> the fire is out. Firemen go in with oxygen if they need to enter
> before this is done. (obviously there would be an entire tested
> procedure for how this is done, probably including a small oxygen mask
> with ~4 minutes of O2 placed beside each fire extinguisher and within
> easy reach).
You'll never get your insurance company to sign off on this. The US
Navy loses people to CO2 fire suppression systems from time to time;
acceptable risk on a warship and acceptable risk in a data center are
not even on the same page. This includes dumps that are unintentional
- having enough CO2 around to do meaningful fire suppression in a
moderate size datacenter has its own hazards associated with it.
http://gcaptain.com/maritime/blog/the-dangers-of-co2-use-in-firefighting-videos/
Being in the same room as a halon or fm200 dump is bad enough. I
don't think I'd be willing to work at (or make my employees work at) a
datacenter that had CO2 fire suppression installed, no matter how
strenuous the assurances were that there were interlocks in place.
---Rob
