Former NATO Nuclear Bunker Now an 'Airless' Unmanned Data Center 148
An anonymous reader writes A German company has converted a 1960s nuclear bunker 100 miles from network hub Frankfurt into a state-of-the-art underground data center with very few operators and very little oxygen. IT Vision Technology (ITVT) CEO Jochen Klipfel says: 'We developed a solution that reduces the oxygen content in the air, so that even matches go outIt took us two years'. ITVT have the European Air Force among its customers, so security is an even higher priority than in the average DC build; the refurbished bunker has walls 11 feet thick and the central complex is buried twenty feet under the earth.
How is maintenance performed? (Score:5, Interesting)
Do staff go down with O2 tanks for maintenance, cleaning, server work, etc?
Re:How is maintenance performed? (Score:5, Funny)
Hopefully the "low staff" was intentional, and not a side effect.
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I can see a good BOHF episode answering this question.
The episodes have addressed it many times. In fact, both the article AND THE /. story talk about it: "We developed a solution that reduces the oxygen content in the air, so that even matches go out..."
The answer is easy enough: Halon satisfies their requirements, as do Halon substitutes. They work well for cooling and suppress fires. Halon discharges are a BOFH staple.
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Way too complicated.
95% nitrogen would do the same thing.
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Way too complicated.
The fire extinguishers are already in the data center, which is where they belong. Having bean counters or managers in proximity just causes the doors to lock from the outside and the halon to discharge. Simple and effective.
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Any solution should be readily human detectable so as to prevent bad mistakes being made. Nitrogen is extremely dangerous (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_bag) in terms of person being able to react to it prior to loss of consciousness.
Of course putting data in a bunker still does not solve the real problem, what point securing your data if no one can access it ie the infrastructure outside of the bunker is non-functional, what exactly are they attempting to preserve. Whilst they do try to wrap perc
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'We developed a solution that reduces the oxygen content in the air, so that even matches go outIt took us two years'."
This sentence may have been written in there.
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'We developed a solution that reduces the oxygen content in the air, so that even matches go outIt took us two years'."
This sentence may have been written in there.
No, it's just consequence of /.'s old lack of compliance with Unicode and disregard of the mandatory space after punctuation in the source. So when the pasted text was rendered, the ellipsis was suppressed nothing was left between the words "out" and "It".
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Same as how upkeep is done in submarines. They also have very low oxygen, but enough for a person not to die. Of course, there are side effects... your thinking is slower, and wounds take a lot longer to heal, but it does work, and the low O2 in the air does keep fires from spreading.
Re:How is maintenance performed? (Score:5, Funny)
Do staff go down with O2 tanks for maintenance, cleaning, server work, etc?
Easy problem. They just hired some Perl divers to do admin. Those guys can hold their breath for an impressive amount of time and are comfortable with CLI use, natural fit.
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That may just have been the bestest thing I ever read this week. thank you!
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How common are datacenter fires? The last time I heard about a computer catching fire was more than 20 years ago, and the fire was minor and didn't spread to adjacent equipment. They seem to be putting a lot of effort and expense into solving a "problem" that has already be adequately solved.
Other than fire suppression, is there any other practical advantage to locating a datacenter underground?
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That aside, I assume that they got it for peanu
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How common are datacenter fires? The last time I heard about a computer catching fire was more than 20 years ago, and the fire was minor and didn't spread to adjacent equipment.
I suspect the battery stacks, generator fuel, or high current wiring for delivering electricity would be some points of greatest risk.
Theft is not that common in above ground datacenters, either; the facilities are serious about physical security. It is probably due to the same reason the facility is underground in the first pl
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How common are datacenter fires? The last time I heard about a computer catching fire was more than 20 years ago, and the fire was minor and didn't spread to adjacent equipment. They seem to be putting a lot of effort and expense into solving a "problem" that has already be adequately solved.
Other than fire suppression, is there any other practical advantage to locating a datacenter underground?
I would guess that they could NOT figure out a cheap and safe way to supply good air to breath down that deep. So, they decided to go low oxygen environment. Tim S.
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Surface natural disasters wouldn't have an impact. So you don't need to worry about storms, wind, hurricanes, tornados, etc. Terrorism, explosions, etc also are minimized, at least from outside sources. Physical security is also improved. Cooling may be easier depending on how it's constructed to utilize more consistent temperatures...but that could also work against you if you don't have enough coolin
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So you don't need to worry about storms, wind, hurricanes, tornados, etc.
But you need to worry more about floods or earthquakes.
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Simple rain could be an issue too. Most mines have to be actively pumped to keep up with water seepage, I cannot imagine how this would not be an issue in a bunker.
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Bunkers embedded in hills are naturally flood resistant. :) Germany isn't reknowned for its earthquakes.
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Fire in a Bitcoin mine...
http://www.coindesk.com/galler... [coindesk.com]
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depending on their choice of gas, they might improve the air cooling efficiency
The heavier the gas, the worse it conducts heat. That is why xenon or sulfer hexaflouride are used in double pane windows. Some nukes use helium as a coolant. The only O2 replacements that would be both safe and cheap would be N2 or argon, which both weigh about the same as air.
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What about CO2?
It's only about 2/3 heavier than air, but easy to get ahold of and safe.
CO2 is not safe. 1% CO2 can cause drowsiness. 2% can cause loss of consciousness. 5-10% can kill, even in the presence of sufficient oxygen.
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I think you mean CO not CO2
No, I mean CO2. From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:In concentrations up to 1% (10,000 ppm), it will make some people feel drowsy. Concentrations of 7% to 10% may cause suffocation, even in the presence of sufficient oxygen, manifesting as dizziness, headache, visual and hearing dysfunction, and unconsciousness within a few minutes to an hour. The physiological effects of acute carbon dioxide exposure are grouped together under the term hypercapnia, a subset of asphyxiation.
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No, just red shirts.
I have an image from some routine maintenance (Score:2)
It's no big deal. [nocookie.net]
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Not really an issue. Humans are fine in low-oxygen environments - so long as they don't go running around too much. Think how high mountaineers have to go before resorting to the tanks,
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I should clarify that low oxygen percentage isn't the important part - it's low partial-pressure of oxygen. Reduced-oxygen at atmosphere, or atmospheric composition at reduced pressure, or even low-oxygen at high pressure (Diving on trimix) or high-oxygen at low-pressure (Spacesuits). It's all the same.
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Do staff go down with O2 tanks for maintenance, cleaning, server work, etc?
Agreed. And don't forget to include the Facility Infrastructure (UPS, Transfer Switches, Switchgear, etc). To that point, I wonder how their generators function with no oxygen. Kinda hard to ignite diesel with no oxygen, just sayin'.
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They can do what they do/did on some diesel submarines (or on space craft) and have tanks of oxidizer ready to pump into the generator along with the fuel.
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I'll commit slashdot heresy by quoting the first paragraph of the actual article instead of knee-jerk imagination usage.
The technological core of the new Erwin bunker has been designed to run autonomously, and outside of maintenance times the servers deep beneath the earth will operate in a low-oxygen environment to reduce the risk of fire.
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Technically SCBA like the fire department uses, unless they use rebreathers.
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U is for Underwater. I assume the data center is not submerged.
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U is for Underwater. I assume the data center is not submerged.
Perhaps the "U' is for "Under-fluorocarbon".
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How about "underground"?
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I am an underwater fire fighter, you insensitive clod?
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So you're saying they just don't need U?
If it was underwater, the fire department probably wouldn't need to be there.
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Or just pumping in normal air.
The primary purpose of the low-oxygen environment is fire suppression - remember the fire triangle? Underground, a fire is a serious hazard because it's difficult to fight and can spread quite quickly.
So during normal operations, the servers are in a low oxygen atmosphere which means fire opportunities are minimized. During maintenance periods, it's possible to either use an SCBA (perhaps for emergency
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sulfur hexafluoride makes more sense.
In addition to being chemically inert, heavier than air, and available in large industrial quantities-- it also is highly resistive, and makes electrical sparking nearly impossible.
It is also less environmentally dangerous than halon.
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Heavier than air would make it really hard to evacuate out from an underground bunker.
Re:How is maintenance performed? (Score:5, Interesting)
This may or may not be a serious problem, depending on how they designed the data center.
Because it is heavier than air (REALLY heavier than air-- you can float a tinfoil boat on it!), all you need to do to evacuate it is add pressurized normal air above it, and have an openable floor drain reservoir to allow the displaced sulfur hexafluoride to exit through. The normal air will displace the gas.
Additionally, the heaviness of the gas will cause it to stay pooled in the datacenter, meaning you wont have to keep adding gas to the datacenter as often to maintain the low O2 environment.
Additionally, it is "safe" to breathe sulfur hexafluoride. (About as safe as huffing helium)-- it just displaces the oxygen. it does not itself cause any choking or inhalation hazard other than asphyxiation from low O2. It makes your voice very deep sounding.
If done right, "draining" the gas could be an extremely cost effective solution. (When done, open the vents at the top of the datacenter, then just pump the gas back into the room from the reservoir under the floor.)
So, it being heavier than air may or may not be a problem, depending on how they designed the system.
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I like the idea of using a floor drain to remove gas.
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Sulfur hexafluoride is an . . . extremely potent greenhouse gas. . . . According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, SF6 is the most potent greenhouse gas that it has evaluated, with a global warming potential of 23,900[19] times that of CO2 when compared over a 100-year period. [wikipedia.org]
New production of halon has already been banned (for ozone depletion), anyway, so it is of course not a good choice.
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Of course it is. So is water vapor.
Unlike CO2, Methane, Water vapor, and several others, Sulfur hexafluoride is SIGNIFICANTLY heavier than normal air. Inside an enclosed space, where it wont be diluted through mechanical agitation (wind), it will happily remain pooled.
You know, places like this underground data center.
The reason it has such a high rating is because it is a fully inert fluoride complex. The energy needed to break it down is crazy high. That's kinda important here, because it's used for f
Re:How is maintenance performed? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're employing a gas that's heavier than air in an underground environment, I rather doubt that you'll need to worry about its greenhouse properties.
The greenhouse gasses I worry about are the ones that rise up overhead.
No matter how many panes of glass your greenhouse has, if they're lying on the floor, they're not going to do much.
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How would the SF6 be able to rise high enough to matter? This stuff is seriously heavy compared to all the components of air.
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Wouldn't pure nitrogen be better by this same criterion, and wouldn't need to be pumped out to restore a normal atmosphere.
Re:How is maintenance performed? (Score:4, Interesting)
S-F6 is 6x heavier than normal air.
Pure nitrogen is not anywhere near that level of disparity. Also, pure nitrogen does not have the same electrical insulation properties. You could put a tesla coil in a S-F6 atmosphere, and it would not discharge until a VERY significant voltage had been achieved.
This means that even if an electrical failure occurs in the datacenter, sparking would not be a source of secondary ignition.
Pure nitrogen would also be harder to determine when the atmosphere in the datacenter was safe for human respiration. With the S-F6, if you inhale it, it makes you sound like a steroid pusher. You could immediately tell if the atmosphere had not been vented, long before you became woozy and light headed from O2 deprivation.
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S-F6 is 6x heavier than normal air.
Pure nitrogen is not anywhere near that level of disparity.
Pure nitrogen is a little lighter than air (not that it makes much difference here).
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"Pure nitrogen would also be harder to determine when the atmosphere in the datacenter was safe for human respiration"
Oxygen level sensors have been around for years. the ones around our LN2 storage areas go off when it goes below 19% O2
Noone in their right mind would run a reduced oxygen environment (or possibly reduced oxygen one) without these devices - the legal liabilities don't bear thinking about.
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Logically they would go for something around 4%O2/96%N2. SF6 is ozone depleting and controlled by epa even for medium voltage switches.
You can survive with low exertion levels down to around 2.5%; with a non sealed mask an oxygen or even compressed air bottle would be plenty to get you to a comfortable PPO2 at 8,000 feet.
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I can't imagine going SCBA since they aren't underwater (unless I'm mistaking the meaning here). I would just expect a simple medical-style oxygen mask and small oxygen bottle would suffice, assuming they haven't introduced toxic gasses to the environment.
Headline stupidity (Score:3)
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What about a liquid filling the room?
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I suppose technically, if there is very little oxygen, it's not air anymore, just a mixture of nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide gasses.
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Nitrogen is already 78% of the atmosphere. All they'd have to do is inject pure nitrogen at a rate equal to natural atmpsoheric air entering the structure and they could claim that they reduced the oxygen, as it would drop from about 20% to about 10% that way.
I'm actually curious if this would be low enough to require special breathing equipment or not. I'm no chemist or earth scientist, but I thi
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2018: In order to be more environmentally-friendly with their servers, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and Google have announced a partnership with McDonald's. Your next order of french fries will help save the environment! Apple declined to comment on oil cooling but mentioned that their new campus would bring about a new era of solar power gathered from orbit.
Still easy to hack (Score:2)
They still haven't changed the default password of '321654'.
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I am impressed (Score:2, Informative)
I had to look up this European Air Force. Turns out they've existed longer than I thought! From http://www.europeanaf.net/ [europeanaf.net]:
The European Air Force has now reached its teens!
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How European? European AF dot com.
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Read further. They're a gaming community. I'm super confused as to why they were quoted as something meaningful.
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I had to look up this European Air Force. Turns out they've existed longer than I thought! From http://www.europeanaf.net/ [europeanaf.net]:
The European Air Force has now reached its teens!
OK, next assignment: find the Austrian Navy.
European Air Force? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's no such thing!!!
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There's no such thing!!!
But there is such a thing as a typo and/or translation error. Replace "the European Air Force" with "a European Air Force".
There, new world order conspiracies avoided.
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Side effect of the nuclear era, not DC design. (Score:3)
"...security is an even higher priority than in the average DC build; the refurbished bunker has walls 11 feet thick and the central complex is buried twenty feet under the earth."
Uh, the average DC build isn't done under the threat of nuclear attack and surviving the aftermath.
Don't make it sound like the customers of this data center demanded 11-foot thick walls, or that any DC design would.
Those physical benefits are merely a side-effect of an era we would like to forget about.
This is logistically impossible. (Score:2, Insightful)
The more equipment, the more broken equipment, the more techs need to go in to work on it.
An airless data center would have to be a very small data center, because if someone has to go in and fix something, well, they are gonna need oxygen.
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im sure firemen and scuba divers might be able to help with that....
Not really. Can you imagine repairing a Dell server with scuba tanks and all that?
It's not that it couldn't be done, of course it could. But it would be much too costly.
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Haha. This is essentially impossible. The more equipment, the more broken equipment, the more techs need to go in to work on it. An airless data center would have to be a very small data center, because if someone has to go in and fix something, well, they are gonna need oxygen.
So, all those transatlantic communications cables...I suppose those are all just a myth because we humans would never logistically put something that could break below thousands of feet of water.
Don't even get me started on the logistics behind putting shit in space. We'll need to call Spock for that logic showdown.
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They do but then they take a big expensive ship find the cable and bring it to the surface to fix it.
The real issue is not if it is possible because it is possible. The big question is if it is worth it?
Removing all the 02 mean no fires and reduced corrosion.
It also means more cost for fixing thing that go wrong.
The simplest way to do this would be to flood the bunker with Argon since it heavier than O2 and N2 it should displace the O2 but again the question would be why?
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Don't even get me started on the logistics behind putting shit in space. We'll need to call Spock for that logic showdown.
And the cost is such that only one time, the Hubble Space Telescope, were repairs done to an unmanned orbiting object. Because of cost.
It cost hundreds of millions of dollars to fix that thing.
Cost is important to business. You cannot ignore it, if you do you often find you are making no money at all.
It happens all the time.
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So, all those transatlantic communications cables...I suppose those are all just a myth because we humans would never logistically put something that could break below thousands of feet of water.
You do realize they don't send techs under water to fix those cables, they simply pull the up to the ship and fix it on the surface. Are you saying the data center will pull the computers up by their cords into the open air to fix them? Because that's how I read your sarcastic response.
Are you saying we haven't invented masks, SCUBA gear, or other means to deliver oxygen to humans in close proximity so they can go to the computers to repair them? Because that's how I'm going to reply to your sarcasm. I've programmed Cisco routers in full MOPP gear before.
My point was humans have put hardware in very difficult areas on and around this planet. Sure, I'm struggling to understand the low O2 design here, since no other data center in the world operates like that or requires it. But that en
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Could be filled with a liquid and maintenance made by scuba divers.
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I'm picturing swimming in oil and just thinking ewww.
What kind of 'solution' was it? (Score:3)
Um, what airforce is that? (Score:1)
ITVT have the European Air Force
ok, so a fictional agency that replaces a number of real ones?
European Air Force (Score:3)
http://www.europeanaf.net/ [europeanaf.net]
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I bet the 'Confederate Air Force' would have air superiority in a fight. Their planes are demilled but at least they have planes.
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I think I found the customer for the 5 9's disks (Score:2)
So this is the customer who requested this study: Proposed Disk Array With 99.999% Availablity For 4 Years, Sans Maintenance
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
It makes sense now.
April Fools? (Score:2)
Air Force? Europe? Why didn't the French use it to get to Africa instead of bumming rides on US transports?
Think of the children... (Score:2)
Hypoxic air technology for fire prevention (Score:2)
Hypoxic air technology for fire prevention
Hypoxic air technology for fire prevention, also known as oxygen reduction system, is an active fire protection technique based on a permanent reduction of the oxygen concentration in the protected rooms. Unlike traditional fire suppression systems that usually extinguish fire after it is detected, hypoxic air is able to prevent fire.
Design and operation
Air with a reduced oxygen content is injected to the protected volumes to lower the oxygen concentration until the
Safe at last! (Score:2)
the refurbished bunker has walls 11 feet thick and the central complex is buried twenty feet under the earth.
Finally my World of Warcraft characters will be safe!
Cooling (Score:2)
I don't see any cooling towers in the picture- are they hosted remotely or perhaps using some kind of heat sink to the ground?
Guess where Thepiratebay's new servers are... (Score:3)
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Helium hard drives are sealed. Any cooling other than air cooling should suffice (water, oil, ...)
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I hate pedantic assholes.
Did GP really need to say nitrogen-rich (relative to air at the surface of the Earth) mix?
No. So don't be a dickhead.
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It's a demonstration of the fact that fires simply don't have enough oxygen to stay burning on flammable materials.
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The problem with fire isn't the fire, it's that the fire triggers automatic responses (disconnecting the power), and the room is sealed while the fire is investigated, before the power can be turned back on. So the "fire" almost never does da
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PCBs (printed circuit boards), plastics used as insulation, coatings, and physical parts (card holders, connectors, IC bodies, fans, etc.), paint, capacitor innards (electrolyte and the aluminum), lithium batteries (boom!), and so forth in the servers themselves. Then there's the cabling and connectors between servers and between racks, possibly the floor and ceiling materials, lots more paint, any structural materials used to create the room, etc. Perhaps not as much as in a residence or office, but lots
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Some things are still alive!
And still they play the game!