

Your computer room will overheat next weekend - TomLimoncelli
http://everythingsysadmin.com/2010/05/your-computer-room-will-overhe.html

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aplusbi
That exact scenario happened to one of my former employers. We installed a
server in a closet in this hallway. The hallway had no HVAC and the
installation was in the winter (so the hallway was always very cold). I
remember asking what we were going to do in the summer.

Eventually the summer came around and one morning the server was down.
Fortunately there wasn't anything time-critical on the server, everything was
backed up both on and off site and we got it up and running again a couple of
hours.

It turned out that all we needed to do was cut a vent in the door and mount a
box-fan to it.

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RiderOfGiraffes
"overhead"?

Do you mean "overheat"? It's not too late to fix it ...

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arethuza
We had a cooling failure in the room in our office that had the development
servers (production server are in a data center).

It was well over 40C - the noise was incredible, sounded like the racks were
trying to take off.

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akadruid
I've been surprised just how long "amateur" server rooms survive cooling
failure. Mostly becuase the densities tend to be lower, but also becuse you
just get lucky with the way they're built. At our current office we had a
server room total cooling failure (due to copper piping stolen off the back of
the building...) and although it got very hot (and very loud) in there, we
didn't get any machine failures or thermal shutdowns. But you could feel the
heat radiating out of the walls the rooms around and above the server room
were noticably hotter. If we'd been an older building or the server room had
been built for physical security, the thicker walls would have trapped the
heat and it would be a different story.

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bcl
Not my 'server' room. Granted, its actually my laundry room, so the heat
escapes to the rest of the house, even on hot days. You can see graphs here -
<http://www.digitemp.com>

If you are one of the unlucky then you should be setting up temperature
monitoring and alerting before you exceed the melting point of your Pb free
solder...

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lutorm
When our department was buying a moderately large cluster I remember being
surprised by the fact that one of the considerations for the server room was
that in the event of cooling failure you had to make sure there was enough
time for the 1600 cores to shut down before the temperature went totally
through the roof. I guess the power density of these packed installations is
something not easily imaginable if you don't have experience with them...

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kevinelliott
This really should be a "duh" for any system administrator. If not, time to
find a new job :)

~~~
eli
Unless you work in a large organization, the "system adminstrator" often isn't
actually a System Administrator

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kevinelliott
That doesn't make sense. The larger the organization, the more often they have
large system administrator teams. In fact, most large organizations have
compliance requirements, which often map people with proper skills to proper
titles and responsibilities in order to get the correct liability protection.

I can not imagine Google allowing some junior programmer to setup a little
closet and run servers in there without contemplating cost, heat/cooling,
network allocation, and priviledge management (i.e. what services are running
where, why, and who's managing it).

However, the smaller the organization, I can see this happening. 8 man
startups without a system administrator... Now that is certainly reality.

~~~
kevinelliott
I just now realized what you meant... The guy who doesn't really have talent
can slip into a larger organization, since his work scope is often narrowed or
siloed.

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83457
We used to co-locate our servers with another software/services company that
had a good setup in their office. On a cold winter morning our oldest server
restarted and wouldn't come back up so I went over to their office. The server
room was probably 120 degrees and the server was stuck on a temp warning on
boot. Turned out their AC in the attic froze up.

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ck2
And/Or switch to 32nm. Runs much cooler at load.

I wish AMD would hurry the heck up with their 32nm as Intel is too pricey.

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jim_dot
Air conditioning shuts down on the weekend? THAT'S NOT HOW BUILDING HEAT
REGULATION WORKS.

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jws
You clearly have not leased space in a building owned and run by accountants.

• 4:00pm? Shut it off. Leave the blowers going at least. (Had negotiate life
support systems until 6pm in the next lease.)

• Long weekend? Shut it off.

• Compressor that drives the thermostat system fails? Get a cheap household
unit from Harbor Freight. (Thunderously loud, ran nearly 24 hours a day, for a
while anyway.)

• One of the two main air fans broken? Don't fix. Air still moves. It's ok, I
can put on the hearing protection and work in the server room in the
afternoons when my west facing office is uninhabitable.

• The remaining fan breaks on Memorial day weekend. Why‽ It was already
running 24x7, this is just cruel timing! Now the building gets way too hot and
starts transferring heat through the uninsulated walls into my machine room
overloading my cooling capacity.

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rimantas
Is it really cheaper to turn AC off and then recool the building compared to
keeping AC running?

~~~
jws
Probably yes. As your temperature approaches the outside temperature less heat
enters the building, so there is less heat to pump out. (Non-linearities
probably abound though.)

