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A false smoke alarm almost drowned Jane Street's only NYC datacenter
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The article reminds me of when Hurricane Sandy took out a bunch of New York DCs with 3+ feet of water and people were carrying diesel up stairs to keep generators running. “The superhuman folks at the data center are hauling 55 gallon drums of diesel fuel up 17 flights of stairs. Assuming they're able to sustain a rate of transfer that exceeds the rate of consumption, the data center should run until electricity is restored. The latest estimate from Con Edison for lower Manhattan is 4 days. (The New York Stock Exchange will be open tomorrow, also running on generator power.)” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4720388 (https://web.archive.org/web/20121101194314/http://status.fog...) https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/how-o...
Comment on Hacker News · 19 direct repliesIn the article he talks about living within a few minutes walk to work and telling too many people so they made him the emergency office guy. Same thing happened to me, foolishly told everyone hey I can see my apartment from here so I would get panicked calls to run in and shut down servers because the information security guy got a tip of an impending exploit about to be released on a holiday weekend with no way to do it remotely. Everyone else lived a ferry ride or commuter train away.
Comment on Hacker News · 3 direct repliesOdd that they didn't have at minimum 1) a physical Emergency Power Off (EPO) button inside the datacenter, such that one button could de-energize everything -- usually required as part of building a datacenter due to code variance for the "low voltage" (<4000V in this context...) wiring. 2) EPO interlink to the smoke alarms, such that it would de-energize equipment automatically (maybe with delay) if smoke detected.
Comment on Hacker News · 1 direct repliesInteresting. The Sequence of Operations we write for the data halls I work on specifically do not shut down the CRACs on smoke alarm for this reason. The International Mechanical Code (IMC) specifically allows this where a air handler over 2000 cfm serves only one space because it's recognized that it will not spread smoke around a building. 2000 cfm is the threshold where you typically have to install smoke detectors, and typically they do shut down on smoke detection. The CRAC won't feed a fire oxygen as it's just recirculating the same oxygen depleted air.
Comment on Hacker News · 1 direct repliesThe episode of their podcast where Ron explores the facilities side of their data centers and offices is worth a listen too https://signalsandthreads.com/the-thermodynamics-of-trading/
Comment on Hacker News · 1 direct repliesI love this story and that they kept the wabi-sabi :-) Missing NYC and this reminds me of NYI back in the day (still there perhaps) and operating datacenters in the heart of Manhattan before things changed. I like that they're keeping the metal close to the traders actually and I'd be totally aligned with that decision. I am surprised however that they haven't shifted to Halon fire extinguishers or something that is safe(r) for a data center.
Comment on Hacker NewsAre there internet connected fire alarms that can be hacked to destroy the contents of some data centers? Like the European freezers?
Comment on Hacker NewsI did not know that data centers with sprinklers exist. I guess this is a very stupid idea in the first place. If there is a fire the decision is: all equipment might be lost in a fire OR all equipment will be lost by water damage.
Comment on Hacker News · 5 direct replies> every minute, ask every server in each location directly for the temperature from its onboard sensors, take the average, and if it’s elevated, blast an alert out to everyone on the systems team to check for datacenter overheat. I've once done the opposite: the office "server room" (a small room with three racks, two of them for the patch panels, one for the servers and switches) was cooled by a mini-split which was prone to locking up with the compressor enabled (the relay which controls the compressor got stuck) and freezing, which then stopped the air from circulating due to all the ice. I wrote a script which ran on one of the servers which read the ambient temperature through IPMI to detect when the room was too cold, email a warning, and power off (using ssh) the neighboring servers and then itself.
Comment on Hacker NewsGreat story, I love those in-the-trenches emergency stories. I wonder if it would have impacted Jane Street in any meaningful way, aside from a fat bill, if it ended with submarine servers. They could have diverged their compute to another datacenter surely. We mostly hear about engineers from Jane Street here, and not much from their traders and finance people. I wish we could have some other perspective sometimes. They publish a great podcast, Signal and Threads, I really recommend.
Comment on Hacker News · 1 direct replies