"Hypothetical" Datacenter Overheating

Tue Jan 16 06:48:36 UTC 2024

Something worth a thought is that as much as devices don't like being
too hot they also don't like to have their temperature change too
quickly. Parts can expand/shrink variably depending on their
composition.

A rule of thumb is a few degrees per hour change but YMMV, depends on
the equipment. Sometimes manufacturer's specs include this.

Throwing open the windows on a winter day to try to rapidly bring the
room down to a "normal" temperature may do more harm than good.

It might be worthwhile figuring out what is reasonable in advance with
buy-in rather than in a panic because, from personal experience,
someone will be screaming in your ear JUST OPEN ALL THE WINDOWS
WHADDYA STUPID?

On January 15, 2024 at 09:23 clayton at MNSi.Net (Clayton Zekelman) wrote:
 > 
 > 
 > 
 > At 09:08 AM 2024-01-15, Mike Hammett wrote:
 > >Let's say that hypothetically, a datacenter you're in had a cooling 
 > >failure and escalated to an average of 120 degrees before 
 > >mitigations started having an effect. What are normal QA procedures 
 > >on your behalf? What is the facility likely to be doing? 
 > >What  should be expected in the aftermath?
 > 
 > One would hope they would have had disaster recovery plans to bring 
 > in outside cold air, and have executed on it quickly, rather than 
 > hoping the chillers got repaired.
 > 
 > All our owned facilities have large outside air intakes, automatic 
 > dampers and air mixing chambers in case of mechanical cooling 
 > failure, because cooling systems are often not designed to run well 
 > in extreme cold.  All of these can be manually run incase of controls 
 > failure, but people tell me I'm a little obsessive over backup plans 
 > for backup plans.
 > 
 > You will start to see premature failure of equipment over the coming 
 > weeks/months/years.
 > 
 > Coincidentally, we have some gear in a data centre in the Chicago 
 > area that is experiencing that sort of issue right now... :-(
 > 
 > 
 > 

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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