Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

And the article went on, and on, and on...

As for their humidity problem, the article says little about how their badly designed chiller-less system got into a condensing situation. The original article in the Register does.[1]

This was an HVAC configuration error. The facility used evaporative cooling, which dumps heat into water by running air through a water spray or some wet surface. This raises the humidity. They somehow got the system configured so that it was recirculating air through the evaporative cooler, increasing the humidity on each pass until it hit saturation. The problem only lasted for a few hours until somebody figured out what was wrong.

They probably didn't have a union-trained stationary engineer on site. This sort of thing is covered in the apprenticeship training for a stationary engineer. Fans, dampers, and controls can all fail, which can create situations like this. Stationary engineers deal with those problems. At large data center scale, you may need one.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/08/facebook_cloud_versu...

Thank you, the article was really annoying me by talking about everything but the actual problem. Really does sound like somebody tried to cheap out by not hiring the person(s) they needed. I know people that never got past the 8th grade that wouldn't have made such a mistake. They should of at least been monitoring humidity levels when they turned it on and noticed the problem before the entire place got to 100% humidity.

Regardless of how it happened I'm glad, because now we can say that for a while millions of Facebook users had their data literally stored "in the cloud".

Initially I was a bit confused about the transition from where they were talking about the rain cloud to where they started talking about the history of the Internet, but I enjoyed it nonetheless and I don’t get why the story was flagkilled.

To me it seems that actually the story about the cloud was meant to be an introduction to the remainder of the text.

The story is about how “the cloud” where we put our data is an abstract concept and that even those of us that know about data centers and servers and so on, most of us know very little about the concrete physical locations of every data center and where the individual fiber lines go in the US.

The way the introduction was done however made it seem like the point of the article was to talk about the neurological cloud that had formed in that Facebook data center. And of course they made the matters worse by then picking the title to be about that as well.

But like I said, I think it was an interesting read.

it went on and on and on because the article isn’t actually about the cloud in the data center.

It's not really clear what this article is about

It's a critical review.

It's a poem.

Edit: It's a mediocre poem.

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