The mechanism for making "the hot aisle" temporarily habitable fails, you get stuck on/in something and can't get out in time.... Life imitates art.
I pulled 10 drives so we could run them to another data center as a 'just in case'. The guy I was with passed out about 60' from the door. The air temp outside was ~72F and they had portable hurricane fans blowing air into the data center.
In that ten minutes, I drank 32 ounces of water. I remember that because I went to pick him up, kicked my water bottle by accident and it fell over because it was empty.
He spent 30 minutes in an ambulance, about three hours in a hospital from 10 minutes exposure. It took me about two hours to recover to the point where I felt I could eat.
Don't lose respect for heat. :)
I'm not.
Relatively extreme temps are an issue, but can be overcome. If it requires a couple weeks of practice for your staff to get used to working in 100-120f low rh environments but saves huge amounts of energy, it is worth considering.
In a cloud hosting environment, you could eventually have non safe temperatures in active operation, lots of redundancy, and just do all your human maintenance during reduced power/temp windows all at once. Sort of like treating the data center as the inside of a computer. Either run multiple facilities or partition by thermal suite or hae the equipment power management be able to throttle cores for reducing heat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauna
You had only 60C (140F).
Fainting after just 10 minutes in 60C is too fast.
BTW, most likely reason your friend spent time in ambulance and hospital is because your employer wanted to be on the safe side, not because your friend really needed it.
He and I were business partners and this was one of our management contracts. It was ultimately his decision with my strong recommendation to go to the hospital since he was still weak. The paramedics offered ten more minutes on site, but, he opted for the hospital.
We were young and dumb, now I'm not so young. Faced with the same situation today, I doubt I would do it again and I certainly wouldn't force an employee to do it.
It really happens - even to young people at their peak condition. In dry climates, with mildly hot weather around 90-93 F.
Perhaps I'm stating the obvious, but awareness makes a big difference in these situations. It doesn't hurt to have a little EMT / Paramedic training too.
But 10 minutes exposure to 60C dry air is not nearly enough for fainting.
In a hot dry climate, you do lose water much faster.
When overheated, you sweat. Sweat leads to evaporation, which leads to your skin cooling.
In humid environments, our sweat does not evaporate as well. This leads to less cooling, which leads to more sweating and thus more water loss.
But may be it was mostly due to stress...
But just 10 minutes of it still shouldn't have such serious effect.
One of the strongest principles of Islamic law is that necessity overrides prohibition. If you're working outside in severe heat and becoming dehydrated, you're allowed to -- and arguably required to -- drink water, Ramadan or no Ramadan.
(He was saying ME Muslims do x degrees without water, so 140 with water should be tolerable. X is anywhere from 90 to 120+ in certain ME countries).
Not that I'm trying to seriously forecast anything, or have any special knowledge of data center design; this is just a pleasant exercise in near-future sci-fi.
Chris Evans in Sunshine dies as he gets stuck under a computer tower which is being lowered back into its freezing cold fluid.
Could it be that hot datacenters have some poisonous gases evaporated into the air?
In the event of a fire, they have (had?) a system that would release a gaz in the data-center that would "eat" oxygen so that the said fire would die.
Obviously any living creatures trapped in the data-center would die as well. The evacuation time before release was perhaps something like 30 to 60 seconds (I can't remember that). Just enough to drop anything and reach one of the safe corridor where no gaz is released.
In '86, I was in a data center that had expanded to take up 70% more space. During the expansion, emergency lighting hadn't been put up. During expansion, a 470 volt three-phase line had been put in, the insulation had been stripped off while they were pulling it through the conduit. As it heated up, gas or vapors from the melted insulation built up and the 1/4" thick conduit was ripped open with roughly an 8" hole and an explosion people on the first floor heard (computer room was in the basement).
One of the operators panicked, tripped over the anti static carpet, ripped the Fire Suppression box off the wall and pulled the Halon. He stumbled out the automatic sliding glass doors and hit the EPO leaving the data center completely dark with me about 120' from the door in pitch black.
I had walked those corridors between the drives hundreds of times, but, had difficulty finding the path. Time was running out, so, I stood on one of the minicomputers, moved one of the drop ceiling tiles and stuck my head into the return air plenum and the Halon went off. It was noisy, sort of a giant whoosh with a low rumble and a very odd smell.
I don't know how long I stood there, but, it wasn't more than a few minutes before a flashlight was shining on me with a Fireman in full gear.
After that, we had emergency lighting and oxygen tanks throughout and the Halon system was upgraded. When the tanks were refilled, they did the math and noticed that the amount of Halon we had wasn't enough for the expanded data center and probably wouldn't have extinguished a fire.
Most humorous moment - seeing firemen walk through the data center with axes in hand looking for fire.
Imagine the scene - shredded ceiling tiles and years of dust and grime everywhere! It really looked like a bomb had gone off. Fortunately there was no-one in the room during the test and everything kept running, but the clean-up took quite some time.
Good 'ole Racal Milgo equipment - where we had ~24* terminals on a 9600 baud line and we were happy to have that much bandwidth.
After that incident, there were a lot of changes to the data center, all safety related. It was a combination of an office building that was repurposed, a county government that was expanding very quickly, computer equipment that was taking more room and a government contractor under pressure to keep things running while the expansion was going on.
I don't believe the county government fined itself, but, things did change. It was the only building other than the courthouse in another city where we didn't run plenum rated cable. After the incident, all cable we ran was plenum rated.
It was the wild west back then. 143mb hard drives were the size of file cabinets, 67mb removable disks had 5 platters and weighed about 20 pounds. PCs were just starting to come into play, but, the mainframes and minicomputers took a lot of space. The tape library was easily 300 sq feet. When we needed more space, we asked the county, they would move whatever office group was adjacent to the computer room and the space would be expanded. There wasn't a lot of documentation at the time regarding best practices.
I never really felt that I was in danger, though, at 18, you sort of feel invincible anyhow. Had the computer room been built properly and not been converted office space, it wouldn't have had a drop ceiling and the outcome may have been different. Had the system been sized properly for the expanded room, perhaps things would have been different.
Edited: even though the mux we were using was a 32 channel mux, probably eight or more of the ports would have been 1200 baud for printers.
So I downloaded a torch.
I love the 21st century.