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-vid... 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