The article reminds me of when Hurricane Sandy took out a bunch of New York DCs with 3+ feet of water and people were carrying diesel up stairs to keep generators running.
“The superhuman folks at the data center are hauling 55 gallon drums of diesel fuel up 17 flights of stairs. Assuming they're able to sustain a rate of transfer that exceeds the rate of consumption, the data center should run until electricity is restored. The latest estimate from Con Edison for lower Manhattan is 4 days. (The New York Stock Exchange will be open tomorrow, also running on generator power.)”
I was working at a data center in the financial district during Sandy. That was quite the experience. For whatever reason, our building was one of the last to have power turned back on. We never had to move diesel by hand fortunately. We did have a fun moment early on where one of our generators needed to have most of its load reduced for a few minutes. There were a pair of external fuel filters that needed to be changed fairly frequently. They were meant to be redundant so you could change one at a time. By the time we were able to get a tech on site, they were so dirty that when we started switching to just one the generator came very close to stalling out. After some conversation we thought it was thought that if we could drop the load enough we should be able to get away with just one dirty filter for a short period of time. The only chance we had at that was to shut down all of our cooling units. The generator was on the roof, and I was coordinating the timing over radio. You could dedinitely hear the generator wasn’t happy, but it worked. As soon as the second filter was replaced I let everyone know it was time to turn all of the cooling units back on. No one responded, and after a pause I realized that meant that probably no one had heard me and things were getting hot fast. I sprinted back inside. On the way my radio dropped, so once inside I sprinted to all of the units to tell people to turn them back on. For some reason I didn’t think about grabbing someone else’s radio. That may have been a lucky mistake though, as I’m not sure what all of those compressors turning at at the same time would have done.
There were a lot of memorable experiences that week or so.
You put them up there so you get a voltage boost from the gravity pushing the electricity down. Put the generators on the ground floor, and by the time the electricity reached the top, there would be a voltage drop.
Apparently it was a 30-person 5 gallon bucket brigade of customers, contractors, and volunteers all lining up to help fill tanks because of interconnection issues between the supplier they got and where they needed to fuel the tanks up with.
"... neither we nor the fuel company had the proper coupling to tie into that existing infrastructure."
Sometimes "DR" in your plans stands for "didn't realize".
In the article he talks about living within a few minutes walk to work and telling too many people so they made him the emergency office guy. Same thing happened to me, foolishly told everyone hey I can see my apartment from here so I would get panicked calls to run in and shut down servers because the information security guy got a tip of an impending exploit about to be released on a holiday weekend with no way to do it remotely. Everyone else lived a ferry ride or commuter train away.
Not the person you asked, but I've learned that if you're not careful about what you tell your employers and/or coworkers that it will almost invariably come back to haunt you in the form of unpaid labor.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that (my 30's), and now I keep my conversations with my coworkers very utilitarian and divulge minimal information about myself. I try not to be a dick or anything, I'm polite enough, but pretty much everything I talk about is either directly relevant to work and/or so surface level as to border on "vapid".
I've learned that life is what you make of it. If you let yourself be used - others will use you. But if you showed your worth, but also showed others that you know your worth - things are different.
(otherwise where I work, I also avoid talking about politics for instance, but this is a different theme)
Odd that they didn't have at minimum 1) a physical Emergency Power Off (EPO) button inside the datacenter, such that one button could de-energize everything -- usually required as part of building a datacenter due to code variance for the "low voltage" (<4000V in this context...) wiring. 2) EPO interlink to the smoke alarms, such that it would de-energize equipment automatically (maybe with delay) if smoke detected.
That's how the server room at my school worked. They said to get out of there if the alarm went off because the room would fill with some inert gas and you'd suffocate.
I wonder why the answer was to turn off the servers instead of turn their cooling back on. Would it not be able to stabilize the temperature fast enough?
There's tons of substitutes, the ban on Halon wouldn't be why Jane St is using water.
Tons of people use "halon" when they are talking about general inert gas based fire suppression as there's not really a good short word for them otherwise.
Realizing that I'm spoiling some of it... but we're here, so some of it is inherently spoiled...
The fire alarm klaxon went off and the siren warning
of imminent halon gas release was screaming. We
started to panic but the data center manager shouted
over the din, "Don't worry, the halon system failed
its acceptance test last week. It's disabled and
nothing will happen."
He was half right, the primary halon system indeed
failed to discharge. But the secondary halon system
observed that the primary had conked and instantly
did its duty, which was to deal with Dire Disasters.
It had twice the capacity and six times the discharge
rate.
They don't have to blow that fast. It can be regulated.
But yes, I've seen low-O2 installations also. These have other issues though, like no protection when humans need to be in there for maintenance. And the need to be very very careful when reducing it again, making sure everyone is out. It happened to my colleague once that this went wrong and while it's not low enough that you'll die, he wasn't exactly feeling great for the next few hours.
We had it at work at a datacenter right beside offices and reception.
You just have to reinforce the ceiling panels and the windows so they don't get blown out, but it's not really an issue otherwise. It was all certified and regularly checked. Water is indeed a bit counterproductive as it's not really much better than fire for the equipment in there.
PS: Halon itself is of course gone but it's other less harmful gases these days.
What also happens is low-oxygen environments (they only raise the O2 when maintenance is being done).
“The superhuman folks at the data center are hauling 55 gallon drums of diesel fuel up 17 flights of stairs. Assuming they're able to sustain a rate of transfer that exceeds the rate of consumption, the data center should run until electricity is restored. The latest estimate from Con Edison for lower Manhattan is 4 days. (The New York Stock Exchange will be open tomorrow, also running on generator power.)”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4720388 (https://web.archive.org/web/20121101194314/http://status.fog...)
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/how-o...
There were a lot of memorable experiences that week or so.
https://x.com/BrettHarrison/status/2117636364304892206
Apparently it was a 30-person 5 gallon bucket brigade of customers, contractors, and volunteers all lining up to help fill tanks because of interconnection issues between the supplier they got and where they needed to fuel the tanks up with.
"... neither we nor the fuel company had the proper coupling to tie into that existing infrastructure."
Sometimes "DR" in your plans stands for "didn't realize".
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that (my 30's), and now I keep my conversations with my coworkers very utilitarian and divulge minimal information about myself. I try not to be a dick or anything, I'm polite enough, but pretty much everything I talk about is either directly relevant to work and/or so surface level as to border on "vapid".
(otherwise where I work, I also avoid talking about politics for instance, but this is a different theme)
33 Thomas St is basically one huge datacenter, that's why it doesn't have any windows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street
I smell AI
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromotrifluoromethane
Tons of people use "halon" when they are talking about general inert gas based fire suppression as there's not really a good short word for them otherwise.
So fire suppression and data centers don't mix too well
https://www.hack.org/~mc/texts/vaxen-joke.txt
Realizing that I'm spoiling some of it... but we're here, so some of it is inherently spoiled...
But yes, I've seen low-O2 installations also. These have other issues though, like no protection when humans need to be in there for maintenance. And the need to be very very careful when reducing it again, making sure everyone is out. It happened to my colleague once that this went wrong and while it's not low enough that you'll die, he wasn't exactly feeling great for the next few hours.
But it's only used in military and aviation these days anyway.
You just have to reinforce the ceiling panels and the windows so they don't get blown out, but it's not really an issue otherwise. It was all certified and regularly checked. Water is indeed a bit counterproductive as it's not really much better than fire for the equipment in there.
PS: Halon itself is of course gone but it's other less harmful gases these days.
What also happens is low-oxygen environments (they only raise the O2 when maintenance is being done).