Slashdot Mirror
Data Centers Breathe Easier With Less Oxygen
PC World is reporting that some companies are looking at a new method of fire protection in their server closets, oxygen-deprivation systems.""Wood stops burning when the oxygen content falls to 17 percent and plastic cables between 16 to 17 percent, said Frank Eickhorn, product manager for fire detection at Wagner Alarm and Security Systems GmbH in Hanover, Germany. Wagner makes electric compressors that use a special membrane to remove some of the oxygen from the outside air, a system the company calls OxyReduct. The excess oxygen is exhausted, and the remaining nitrogen-rich air is pumped inside the data center."
...er, so to speak. But it can't hold a candle to the burning excitement of watching pasty-faced geeks burn out, run out of steam, and pass out in a low-oxygen environment.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How could you work in a datacenter with no oxygen
Hehe, I can just picture Simon locking someone in one of these and slowly dialing down the oxygen until he gets that raise or perk or whatever he's after.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
....pass me that bottle of O2. I have to go bounce the server.
This would only be cool if it were possible to install some elaborate airlock system that made cool whooshing noises upon opening.
www.themobscene.com
Isn't this how halon systems work? It binds with the oxygen to make some other chemical and thus reduces the amount available for combustion?
Yes, its safe to enter, but how long, 1 hour, 3 hours 6 hours 8 hours. The article doesn't mention.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
TFA is way too complex. There are much simpler ways to handle the problem. The oxygen levels in many major cities are below 18% already. Just let CO2 levels keep going up, this will push oxygen percentages down a tad more, and we have no more computer fires.
This should also help keep cleaning personnel out of the inner sanctums of the datacenter, and therefore prevent downtimes due to accidentally plugged-out cables and stuff. And even in case it fails to keep them _out_, it might keep them _inside_ for a loooong time. Relativley well-preserved.
:/
I'm such a morbid bastard at times
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
Geeks come pre-loaded with an oxygen-removal membrane in their lungs... are they cheaper than special pumps?
Now mountain climbing, hang gliding, and other low oxygen sports will be important on my resume!!
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Just imagine the new employee first day: ...
- Here is your cube
- Here is your chair
- Here is your scuba gear
I just know that The BOFH is going to be getting one of these systems installed soon. Only his system will occasionally reduce the oxygen levels much further than is strictly necessary for fire protection.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Sorry, not really datacenter related but it's brought up in TFA. So, at 6000 ft oxygen is much lower similar to this new system. So, there are no fires at that height? Is this true? How about off-site datacenters in the mountains (by the ski slopes)?
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." - Shepard Book Quoting Malcolm Reynolds
This will help to ensure that there are never any bugs resident in the systems.
Why not lock the machines in a vacuum chamber and watercool? Or even full liquid immersion for that matter.
for sale
I'm a self-modifying sig virus
Fire needs oxygen. More on this one as it comes in.
Not only does it stop fires, but it gets rid of your stupid employees!
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Sounds like someone is setting up a perfect environment for the borg!
Hmmmm - I'd rather take the risk of 21% oxygen than having hydrogen tanks sitting there in the server room....
Although I'm sure this is safe for day-to-day operations (for low-altitude data centers) and will prevent a self-sustaining blaze, I'd bet that a smoldering powersupply would convert an unpleasant fraction of the low-oxygen atmosphere into carbon monoxide. Oxygen-staved combustion tends to produce this deadly gas (which kills by binding to hemoglobin better than does oxygen)
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The lower oxigen content just means that fires will not selfsustain. But if you have an external source for energy input, like the short you mentioned, thngs will still get hot and start to smoke. The chances are just a bit better that it does not cause a full-on fire.
You are not supposed to be working all the time in the serverroom anyway, it's much too noisy in there and your 200Watt of heat production would be much better used to warm your office.
In other words: you would have noticed that fire too late anyway if you had to rely on the amount of smoke coming from it.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
There are already several systems on the market that do this. Some that have been around for decades, infact. Inergen is one of them. Shit, wikipedia even has an entry about it - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inergen
If you didn't care about cost and or keeping people alive in the data center Helium would be the ideal inert gas.
No fires to worry about and it is a great conductor of heat.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Just your memory doesn't function as well, so you better make all the passwords really simple.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
First; how is this news? Using halon or CO2 or whatever to put out fire has been done for ages.
Second; what happens when the low oxygen level are keeping a fire from igniting and someone opens the door?
Third; how much would a brain damaged BOFH cost you?
But it can't hold a candle to the burning excitement of watching pasty-faced geeks burn out, run out of steam, and pass out in a low-oxygen environment.
Watch an out-o'-shape pasty-tubby try to ride a bicycle some time: with all his belabored breathing, one would think he was climbing Everest instead of pedaling on level ground.
I, of course, am in perfect shape, with nary an ounce of extraneous tissue to be seen...
*looks around furtively*
*runs away*
*collapses after 30 yards*
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
We had a similar issue when with the proliferation of large power-stations: water was pumped into cooling towers and then dumped in rivers. The cooling process de-oxygenated the water and this obviously meant the 'poisoning' of rivers (fish unable to breathe etc). We have a similar situation here. Only this time, the facility actually holds on to the oxygen. Why not mix it with the exhaust air (I'm sure it's not completely recirculated?) and avoid the potential for a similar situation. I know TFA says it's beathable, but it's worth considering the option nonetheless. Not all animals are humans. Remember what scale datacentres operate on, and which direection they're going in (they're not getting smaller). Has the potential not to be a significant issue...
-1 not first post
1) I wonder what effect that will have long term on the components. Specifically, will it reduce the oxidation on the metallic parts? Hmmm...
2) What about having to wait twenty minutes or something to get the oxygen levels high enough for the techs to fix a major crash. I guess the idea might be that the computers take care of their own major disasters.
Not only are server rooms windowless, freakishly cold, and with uncomfortable chairs, but now they asphyxiate you too.
Alright, at 15% oxygen it is comparable to 6,000 ft. above sea level. Safe? Yes! If you have ever been skiing/hiking/anything active in higher altitudes (I know this might be asking a lot of some Slashdotters) you know that it is quite safe. You just have to pace yourself. So... think of working in one of these server rooms like Denver maybe. That said, it would make a good excuse for Scuba Gear Tuesdays.
This way the IT guys get there own personal Oxygen Bar to put the "exhausted" oxygen to good use!
...
From TFA:
At 15 percent oxygen, it's safe for humans to enter. The lower oxygen content of the air is similar to being at an altitude of about 6,000 feet, Eickhorn said. He demonstrated with a lighter inside a sealed atrium Wagner has on display at Cebit. It won't light.
6,000 feet? People regularly burn wood above 6,000 feet don't they? Basically, someone in a mountain state with a wood stove, or camping. People in the Andes are probably burning wood even higher than that.
Does someone know how this is supposed to work? Am I missing something?
Why, yes I have been touched by His noodly appendage. And I plan to sue.
Boss (on telephone to sysadmin in data centre): "I'm sorry Dave, but your recent conduct just hasn't been acceptable. I've decided to invoke the disciplinary procedure, and having discussed this with Mr. Flibble we've decided that this warrants 2 hours of W.O.O."
Sysadmin: "What's W.O.O.?"
Boss: "With
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Does this mean that things don't burn above 6,000 altitude? I guess that I just imagined having camp fires above 8,000 feet in the Rockies. I saw the remains of a wooden building at over 14,000 feet that had burned to the ground. Something doesn't smell right with this article.
Redesignate the open floor space as the management conference room. The oxygen will be sucked out in no time.
People cook out up in Estes Park at 9-13K all the time. Maybe dude needs to refill his lighter...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I guess removing the oxygen from air is a very energy inefficient method. I've got an environmentally better solution:
Why, in stead of nitrogen enriched air, use carbondioxyde (CO2) gas? CO2 is not flammable and doesn't attack the hardware and reduces fire hazard just like nitorgen gas (N2).
Get a server plant a power station (preferably running on natural gas) and a house. Power plant feeds energy to server plant and house. Power plant feeds produced CO2 to server plant. Coolant is first fed to servers and then to power plant. Afterwards used to heat house. There simply is no added energy required.
Get a greenhouse, feed it with CO2 from power plant to make food for the house and presto!
____
Some of my entries might have been filed under "B" for bad ideas, I have no idea why.
Great, now I have to wear a wireless bluetooth headset AND an oxygen mask when I'm on a tech support in the Data Center.
The guys in HR already call me "space man."
Halon works by actually disrupting the combustion reaction.
many many moons ago, i worked briefly at an oxygen concentrator manufacturing company. which is basically what this unit sounds like, an oxygen concentrator that sort of works in reverse, you keep the exhaust and throw away the product. these devices work by forcing compressed air through a molecular sieve - nitrogen adheres to the sieve and O2 passes straight through. but then you've got to get the nitrogen back out of the sieve, which requires decompressing the filter medium. all that energy you used to filter the air is then lost and you must start again. so through a series of compressions and decompressions, you can extract some pretty high purity O2 (about 95% was typical then), in a convenient home unit, but with the drawback of not being very energy efficient.
This might be safe for humans, but is it optimal for normal functioning. With a lower oxygen content, won't your lungs need to labor more to recover oxygen, and/or wouldn't your work ability be impaired somewhat (sleepiness etc) but the oxygen-poor air? This would be especially true if physical labour was required, for example lifting heavy servers on/off racks.
yeah, but CO2 is actually poisonous to breathe in any quantity for very long. space stations and shuttles have CO2 scrubbers for a reason.
A few decades ago I served on a submarine. The oxygen generator stopped working for a while, and for operational reasons we couldn't snorkel for fresh air. The percentage of oxygen dropped below the point where combustion is supported, so the smokers were out of luck. People's lungs respond to the partial pressure of oxygen in air, not the absolute percentage, so the crew including myself were fine, since we were only at about the equivalent of 10,000 feet (US units). I always wondered wouldn't it be safer from a fire prevention standpoint to always operate like that.
You dont need to read the article yo realize your not looking where your sniffing.
6000ft = less pressure.
Chamber Of Secrets = less oxygen.
Both are harder to breathe. That's all he said.
People cook out up in Estes Park at 9-13K all the time. Maybe dude needs to refill his lighter...
It isn't just the partial pressure of oxygen that's important for fire. It's also the partial pressure of nitrogen. Nitrogen cools the reaction without contributing to it.
So having the partial pressure of oxygen appropriate to 6,000 feet while having even greater than sea-level partial pressure of nitrogen could well keep a fire from burning (at least in some fuels) and make it much harder than usual to get one started even in things (like magnesium) that would be happy to burn in this atmosphere (or even in pure nitrogen).
Meanwhile the human body is mostly interested in the partial pressure of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Walking into the data center would be like suddenly going from local altitude to 6,000 feet (minus the ear-pops and potential for a case of pressure-related issues). You'd run a little less "brightly" than usual. Live in such conditions 24/7 for a month or so and you'll build up additional hemoglobin in your blood until (like people who live at altitude) you're just fine. (I don't know if you'll get back to "full power" living in them 8/5, though.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I think it is wrong because:
1. The most critical element to a fire isn't just the ratio of oxygen in the air but the *flow* of air to the flame. And in a server room EVERY BOX HAS A FAN FEEDING AIR TO EVERY COMPONENT. So long as the air is exhasuted from the cabinet as fast as the fire uses it up, it will keep burning until the fuel is used up.
2. I don't buy the 6000 ft thing. There is an 8000 ft tall mountain range nearby that catches fire every 8-10 years and darned if it doesn't just keep burning right on uphill, not stopping in the least at 6000 ft.
3. I personally have seen open campfires, from plain old wood and kindling, above 10000 ft.
4. Server rooms don't catch fire that often, and having smoke detectors and a sprinker system are proven (though messy) solutions. Halon (or whatever replaced it recently for ozone layer preservation puposes) can often put out the fire while the rest of the room keeps humming along doing whatever the servers need to do.
5. An oxygen deprived fire is slow and smoldering. It is exactly the kind of fire that will heat up nearby components to near ignition point then flash over when oxygen is supplied (e.g. geek opens server room door) and which is hard to spot while it's ramping up. A nice healthy blaze will make itself known (smoke, heat, visible flame) sooner and is actually safer.
6. There are some extra costs the article doesn't mention: typical drywall and studs + drop ceiling is not exactly air-tight. So you'll have to do some construction work to keep all that oxygen out and to avoid dropping the O2 levels in nearby inhabited spaces.
7. The machinery required to remove O2 is itself composed of mechanical and electrical components and requires power to operate, and further it has to vent the O2 someplace...this O2 rich exhaust has to be carefully managed or it will create and extreme fire hazard all by itself.
They should seal the cabinets instead of the whole room. Then they can run whatever gas they want to keep things cool and non-flammable.
We could computer control that with a special AI-enabled environmental system called The Red Queen. Awesome...
Not all of the ideas are bad.
Look at www.greenfuelonline.com for information about taking CO2 out of powerplant emissions.
How will they run around their little wheels without oxygen? Windows will stop working, Unix will grind to a halt ... has anybody really, really thought this through?
"Cats like plain crisps"
...lower amounts of oxygen to stop server fires if it wasn't for dell laptops.
I can't wait to watch this low-ox tech make the inevitable leap from professional datacenters to homes. Not mine: the neighbors with the yappy little dog. Makes the perfect Christmas gift!
--
make install -not war
This new news on wood's inability to burn in low oxygen environments should come as great news for many areas that are prone to forest fires. At an elevation of over 7000 ft., the national forest area around Santa Fe, NM should now be free its historically nagging threat of fire!
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is _n17_v47/ai_17374449
Among other things, a Kodak safety lecture discussed an employee that modified his Bullard Hood hose connection. He accidently hooked it up to a Nitrogen line. Three breaths later, he was unconscious, and he was dead before anyone could resuscitate him.
They'd better make damn sure NO ONE can defeat the safeties to get into that room. You'll never know what hits you.
The current minimum level for a oxygen deficient atmosphere is 19.5% at sea level. I wonder if they will be handing out SCBA (Self Contained Breathing Apparatus) to the employees. I would also be a little worried about "decreased mental effectiveness, visual acuity, and muscular coordination" in a data center (which occurs at 16% oxygen at sea level (even higher at higher altitudes)). But then again, "Sorry Boss, I think the lack of oxygen is getting to me," does sound like a good excuse.
t ml
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/2005-100/chapter5.h
I guess they have never heard of a "nitrogen package", but most likely is not good choice for their needs.
But then again, I do NOT work for a safety department.
Why, in stead of nitrogen enriched air, use carbondioxyde (CO2) gas? CO2 is not flammable and doesn't attack the hardware and reduces fire hazard just like nitorgen gas (N2).
Because then you WOULD kill people who walked in.
The breathing reflex is regulated by the amount of CO2 in the blood of a particular artery. They'd hyperventilate and pass out.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That should freak the newbies and normal office staff.
Dave: Open the data centre door Hal
Hal: I'm afraid I can't do that Dave.
And your data center will float, too!
Imagine your glowing red hot but not quite burning cable inside a low oxygen cabinet. The equipment isn't working well, some some poor tech is sent to fix it. Said tech opens the cabinet, introducing a lovely fresh mix of 21% oxygen into the cabinet, at which point the superheated pyrolized gasses mix with the oxidizer and you get what we in the fire department like to call...FLASHOVER....it's very bad for the complexion.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
That's all well and good until your datacenter floats away.
People depend on the partial pressure of oxygen, fires the percentage. Thus on US submarines we let the sailors breathe down the oxygen to about 19% before turning on the oxygen generator to keep it at this level. Generating oxygen for people by water electroysis is energy intensive and requires about 500W per person. Now back to fires. As other smart readers of /. have pointed out fires burn at high altitude. In this case the percentage of oxygen is the same (20.9%) as at sea level but the partial pressure of oxygen is reduced which affects people to some degree depending on the person and work load. For the system described in the article one would need to use caution if it was used at high altitudes to make sure that people were not in an environment too low in oxygen.
In the "good old days" most sailors on submarines smoked and could tell when the oxygen level was down because they couldn't light or smoke their cigarettes.
Another aside: the Apollo moon capsule was maintained at about 3 psi of pure oxygen in space. They used lower pressure so the walls of the lunar lander could be very thin, I believe about 0.02 inches thick. The astronauts worried about accidently kicking a hole in the wall. This way the partial pressure of oxygen was the same as on the ground. The original design had the system on the ground at 100% oxygen for simplicity, with of course tragic results...it was modified to begin with normal air then change to 100% oxygen at lower pressure after launch. It was assumed that fires wouldn't burn in space because there is no convection due to zero g. This is flawed because fans are used to circulate the air. Fire in an environment where you are trapped is always a great concern.
And I'm feeling no ill effects of this so called oxygen deprivation.
And I'm feeleeng no ir effex uf this so called oxygun deprivashun.
And I'm feeling noaasdfasdhadgnsdrtxf sbi35aENhb'F
Will this be a successful product? Hard to say. But I wouldn't hold your breath.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
In the US, OSHA safety standards require supplemental oxygen if the oxygen percentage drops below 17.5%. Defying this standard risks a worker lawsuit and some very nasty regulatory fines. Testing with gas monitoring equipment will be required to prove the oxygen level if it is ordinarily below the requirement. At some point, some one must do some work on the equipment. A human at rest may be able to survive quite well at lower oxygen levels but a person doing work may need to consume a higher amount.
Inergen is an inert gas fire suppression system that does exactly the same thing with a much smaller environmental footprint. The gas is generated with similar equipment, and then stored in bottles (similar to Halon et. al.) and then when a fire is detected, the room is flooded with said gas. The installed system is also much less expensive than the equipment.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inergen
I've seen some 40+ year old cooling "towers" made mostly of wood that cascaded the water a lot and would put relatively large amounts of oxygen back in - they were for little 120 MW units. I'm not sure how well the more modern salt shaker type ones do because it all happens on the inside and I really don't want to go in there (Legionella and most likely a lot of more mundane airbourne biological nasties in the mist).
Wasn't Halon the normal gas for this type of stragey? I remember sniffing around old cell sites and seeing the "DANGER - HALON GAS" sings everywhere.
Unlike halon and CO2, which displace the ambient air with something toxic (or at least unbreatheable) until there is not enough oxygen for combustion, this approach allegedly allows you to stay alive in teh reduced atmosphere, at least if the smoke doesn't kill you first.
It doesn't sound particularly fast, to suck the oxygen out rather than displace it with a big load of something like halon or CO2. I still don't see how this is different from just flooding the room with pure Nitrogen.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Now I understand I can't remember anything when I work in the data center. Depriving the air of oxygen would do the equipment good be not the humans.
Saying your "phone ran out of batteries" is like saying your "car ran out of gas tanks".
I have been a system administrator for 20 years and I have never seen a rack of equipmetn hard wired into the mains.
At least in the US, NEMA twist-lock connectors are used for everything over 15A.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
- put him to work in the datacenter!
Somehow I can see that being a bit of a letdown for your average intensely motivated high-altitude mountaineer: "I have climbed the highest peaks on Earth - and WTF? I'm a BOFH stuck in the server room? Get me out of here!"
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Removing oxygen will have a serious impact on the specific heat of air. Datacenters will have to requalify all componenct to work at the "lighter" O2 concentration. Many components will require larger heatsinks are fans.
That said, if you get higher CO2 concentrations in one spot than another you have problems - I've become dizzy making dry ice in a room with reasonably good ventilation by simply being too close to the gas bottle.
Here is a cheaper way: Lock your manager in the server room. No need for any special compressors.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
They're replacing the O2 with Nitrogen? Wouldn't people in the room just start getting a buzz when it kicked in and not leave therefore suffocating? I think it would be far more entertaining to use Helium instead. That way everyone would know that something's up when their voice goes up 4 octaves in pitch!
Or near enough to it at any rate...
So does that mean a data center in Denver or Boulder, CO would naturally benefit from less O2 in the air because of altitude? Does that do it? Is it less O2 or just ratio of o2 to other gasses?
Problem is, the sysadmins would have trouble getting their argument for new hardware across when they all sound like chipmunks!
Neon would also be quite nice. It's a noble gas too, so it would prevent fires, and just think of the satisfaction you'd get from replacing your blinkelights with blinkengas. Imagine an entire server room that glows a brilliant red.
Our FM-200 system:
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
This would be great for meetings surely , it would cut down on the useless chatter. Let us see the managers talk on and on, when they are deprived of a little oxygen. " What is that Mr. Smith ? I can't hear you, catch your breath first "
Hard to break into a datacenter with a barometric chamber as a man-trap... nothing like a case of the bends to slow someone down
Yes, I know... no chance of the bends. But it was the first thing that came to mind, having to cycle through a barometric chamber to get to the raised floor.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
...er, so to speak. But it can't hold a candle to the burning excitement of watching pasty-faced geeks burn out, run out of steam, and pass out in a low-oxygen environment.
The first customer will be "The Pirate Bay". The next raid will be interesting.
The truth shall set you free!
What they're really trying to do is avoid the B.O. of the linux admins, but don't want to tell them directly, so made up this fire prevention story.
Table-ized A.I.
To see how future IT workers will have to reboot servers, please consult the training video in Season 5 of 24. The part where they're locked down in CTU and have to access the data center.
No-one said that fire doesn't burn at 6000 feet. They said it doesn't burn in this oxygen-reduced environment, because the percentage of oxygen is too low. They also said that the environment was similar, for humans, to being at altitudes of 6000 feet. That's not because the percentage of oxygen is lower at that altitude, it's because overall atmospheric pressure is lower, which (apparently) gives a similar effect for humans as being in a reduced-oxygen environment at higher pressure.
Atkin's diet need not be debunked to be criticized. The burden of proof is on it's proponents to show that it is effective.
I'll just dismiss it with a valid appeal to authority; Health Canada has banned any reference to it as positive on food labelling.
Let's reduce the oxygen, pump up the nitrogen, and suddenly every geek that walks into the server room busts out in a giggling shitfit as all the fans and the nitrogen-induced wah-wahs kick in! I'm sure that'll make every IT job so much better! We'll all be half-numb, and laughing our asses off because we'll be so oxygen-deprived!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Not really. It takes about 20 seconds for blood from the lungs to reach the brain. If the blood is desaturated, you'll pretty much pass out instantly when this happens.
N2 is inert. It is not poison. The worst it will do is displace oxygen, giving about the same effect as holding your breath.
No. No. No. It's absofrigginlutely not the same. If you hold your breath, the blood can still take up oxygen from the air in your lungs, and the partial pressure of oxygen in the air in your lungs drops very slowly.
If, on the other hand, the gas in your lungs contains no oxygen (i.e. the partial pressure of oxygen is zero), then the blood will actually release oxygen instead of taking it up while travelling through the lungs, effectively becoming desaturated.
Roughly twenty seconds after you start breathing a gas mixture without oxygen, desaturated blood will reach your brain and it's lights out. Period.
The level of CO2 in the blood must be kept inside upper and lower limits for the acid/base buffer to work correctly. Too much CO2 in the bloodstream will make your blood too acidic and definitely cause toxic side effects. Whoever you're echoing in the above line, he either has absolutely no clue about physiology or is a liar.
If you breathe a gas mixture with about 10%-15% CO2 at atmospheric pressure (you can pick the remaining 85%-90% as you like, it won't make a difference), you'll die.
Co ( carbon monoxide ) on the other hand IS a toxin.
It's toxic in much smaller concentrations than CO2.
to the term "lights out data center".
I'm curious about other health effects. If this is the oxygen equivalent of a 6,000-ft altitude, that's high enough to cause altitude sickness in susceptible individuals on the low side of the bell curve. That can lead to pulmonary edema, cerebral edema, and some other nasty symptoms. And the "rate of ascent" is going to be instantaneous, as you open a door and step into your new environment.
Even if those are related to the lower pressure of altitude, and not just the lower pp of O2, there are other effects of high altitude environment that are a result of the lower O2 levels. Your red cell count will increase, along with your erythropoetin levels. This can actually thicken the blood, and while not dangerous to the trained atheletes who engage in high-altitude training, might be dangerous to the sorts of folks who work in a data center.
"We don't know what a high-protein diet would do over 10 years," he said. "It could impair kidney function or leach calcium out of the bones. But we didn't look at that."
Fire is a side-effect of chemical breakdown due to heat. Materials get hot, their materials begin to break down, resulting in solids, liquids and/or gasses. If the gasses can readily combine with the atmosphere to produce even more heat, you can get a self-propagating chain reaction; fire.
Even without the fire, those original materials would still break down due to heat. Frequently, this beginning stage causes enough odor that the problem is discovered before the equipment fails completely, or before a fire starts. Putting the equipment into an environment that excludes the use of the human nose may not be a good idea.
when you could just build your data center on a mountain! Or fill it with helium. Just as expensive, but it would be funny to listen to the tekies talking high-pitched.
:P
Even simpler: Dump all the systems in oil: good for cooling, and if they don't have any O2, they cant burn! Its a lot cheaper too! No health-risks! Its the perfect solution... except for the lucky person who has to go in the tank to replace something...
OxyReduct...brilliant. Someone stay up all second to come with that name?
alright alright, im confused now. i though computers needed oxygen to make magic fire, which makes the magic smoke they run off of.
oh wait thats right, isnt it a pixie that makes the magic smoke? if thats the case, then lets just fill the room with pixies.
So wood burns at >17% and plastic at >16%.
What's the oxygen level needed to burn the pile of Sysadmin bodies near the exit door?
By your standards, anorexia is a far more effective diet. It's a given that safety is a factor, as there are lots of easy but unsafe ways to quickly lose weight. Bulimics eat well and still lose weight.
Medical science doesn't work the way you want it to. It's assumed that things are dangerous until proven otherwise, most especially when the previous consensus is that they are, such as high fat/protein diets.
Proving a negative is not at all hard. It's proving a universal negative that's difficult. It's pretty easy to conclusively prove there are no unicorns in my trash bin.
Your article implies that there have been no long term studies on the Atkins diet. If that's the case, and it's been around since the 70's, it sounds like it's proponents have deliberately decided not to perform them.
What are you talking about? You do realise there is ~80% of Nitrogen in the air and only >1% of CO2. All they are doing is removing some of the oxygen thereby increasing the nitrogen concentration, which is much easier then displacing oxygen with CO2.
Another thing, it's the concentration of oxygen that's makes stuff flamable, not the amount of CO2 in the air.
Your voice would sound so cool when you came out! Deadkevin
I'm talking about how there are very easy ways to get CO2 - the stuff you are replying to was from somebody else and I think it's a pretty silly idea putting extra CO2 in an area which people may enter too.
I've given you several pushes in the right direction to educate yourself, and you've scoffed at them. I'm not going to force feed you, if you don't want to educate yourself, so be it. I appear arrogant to you because we are not peers, and I don't particularly care about you. I'm not going to hold your hand and walk you through basic understanding.
Again, take a basic class on the philosophy of science, or ask a librarian to help you find literature suited to your level of understanding. Be warned that you'll have to be humble and show initiative in either case, as librarians are educated people who won't listen to your blathering, and will expect you to do your own reading.
As you're still responding, trying to sooth your bruised ego. If you don't see yourself being frequently mocked, you either avoid intelligent people, or it just goes over your head.
I don't have a superiority complex. There are many people more intelligent and educated than me. You're just not one of them. That's ok. The world needs ditch diggers too. Just don't pretend you're anything more until you're willing to earn it.