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.
Your computer room will overheat next weekend
11–20 of 24 posts
Re: Your computer room will overheat next weekend
#12This really should be a "duh" for any system administrator. If not, time to find a new job :)
Unless you work in a large organization, the "system adminstrator" often isn't actually a System Administrator
Re: Your computer room will overheat next weekend
#13Air conditioning shuts down on the weekend? THAT'S NOT HOW BUILDING HEAT REGULATION WORKS.
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.
Re: Your computer room will overheat next weekend
#14And/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.
Re: Your computer room will overheat next weekend
#15When 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...
Re: Your computer room will overheat next weekend
#16This really should be a "duh" for any system administrator. If not, time to find a new job :)
The zillions of little companies with this kind of problem disagree.
Re: Your computer room will overheat next weekend
#17This really should be a "duh" for any system administrator. If not, time to find a new job :)
Not really. In the future there will be a whole crop of system administrators who don't ever deal with hardware and data center issues thanks to cloud computing. There will still be plenty to do and plenty to worry about.
Re: Your computer room will overheat next weekend
#18Air conditioning shuts down on the weekend? THAT'S NOT HOW BUILDING HEAT REGULATION WORKS.
Re: Your computer room will overheat next weekend
#19This really should be a "duh" for any system administrator. If not, time to find a new job :)
The zillions of little companies with this kind of problem disagree.
It's truly common sense for anyone that has racked a server to consider heating conditions in a room. If not, they shouldn't be allowed to rack anything!
Re: Your computer room will overheat next weekend
#20This really should be a "duh" for any system administrator. If not, time to find a new job :)
Unless you work in a large organization, the "system adminstrator" often isn't actually a System Administrator
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.