How Cold is your Server Room?

Associate
Joined
15 Oct 2005
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1,979
Location
Edinburgh
There have been a few studys recently (one of my hosting team has been harping on about them)which have shown that as long as the humidity is low that computer rooms into the 40-50 mark are viable with little if any reduction in the life of the hardware. Obviously not nice to work in or near but gives a different twist on what the rooms can support. Also it appears that hard drives have an extended life in a warmer temperature...

[prepares for the barrage of comments]

I'm sure that's correct, I've had mine hit 40+ for long periods of time a few summers ago before we could get our existing aircon upgraded. No problems at all.

The problem I see is that it leaves little room for failure, 40-50 ambient in the room would mean 50-60 inside the servers. One problem with the aircon and you could quickly see the temps getting a little too hot.
 

Ev0

Ev0

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
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14,152
Bloomin' freezing when in there for ages :p

In our main office got 3 of the 4 walls with air conditioning units on so trying to hide from the blasts of cold air isn't easy. Can't even stand directly under one as the direction of the air flow moves :(
 
Man of Honour
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30 Jun 2005
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London Town!
Wear a coat if you're in there for more than 5 minutes cold. good enough for me, in spite of that the line cards in some of the MPLS kit hover around the 70 degree mark and they supposedly fail at 95 degrees...
 
Soldato
Joined
30 Jul 2005
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2,834
Location
Bristol
I use a monitoring system that emails me if it goes under 16 degrees or over 17.5 in our server room.

We use a raised floor system and each rack has a hole under it the cold air comes up through the floor.

this is measured at the top of the rack furthest from the aircon units in our room.

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in our old building we had major cooling issues and pants aircon.

Sitting up on the roof of your building with a hose on your aircon rads is not the most fun - im not into sunbathing. Then having to deal with bringing servers backup after thermal shutdown is also not fun if there are issues.
 
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Associate
Joined
24 Oct 2002
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2,294
Location
Cambridge
We keep ours around 20ºc, the guy I work with has started wearing a wooly hat every time he goes in there. We've got another office up in Scotland who don't have any air-con at all and the server room must be 35ºc+.
 
Man of Honour
Joined
30 Jun 2005
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9,515
Location
London Town!
use a better conducter! get some compressed air and clear the dust! somthings not right if they are that far above ambient

Actually it's perfectly normal for them it seems, there's hardly any dust in there, the heatsinks look top notch and thats just how hot it gets when you cram 4 10Gig ports into a fairly small line card... Supplier says it's fairly standard and they're revising their cooling system for the next chassis revision.
 
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