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Your computer room will overheat next weekend

everythingsysadmin.com

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Re: Your computer room will overheat next weekend

#7
post #5

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.

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.

Re: Your computer room will overheat next weekend

#8
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...

Re: Your computer room will overheat next weekend

#9
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.

Re: Your computer room will overheat next weekend

#10
post #4

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

That's how it works in my office building. It also kicks off at 7PM on weekdays. It may not be completely off, but you can hear it blowing all day and at 7PM there's a loud THUMP in the vents and no sound after that.

Not a problem, our server room has independent cooling that takes the heat to a unit on the roof. It might have to work a little harder on long weekends but we keep track of our heat budget and this isn't a problem.

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