How Cold is your Server Room?

Rroff said:
It would be interesting to see if theres a noticeable difference in the life span of components run with an ambient of say 20C and say 28C.
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It will be interesting to see, all the studies currently seem to say the increase in failure rate is within the margin of error, I've yet to see a serious rebuttal to that view.
 
It's something we're quite interested in doing, upping the temps to save cash and be more 'green'.

Just to say I hate the whole carbon green bumph but cleverly someone in our gov agency decided we would be a leader in having a net zero carbon ethic or what not so they are looking at doing anything possible.

As you say most stuff is still well within spec being run at those type of temps.

Hell one of our smaller rooms had the AC fail the other week and the tempts in there got silly high, most kit was still working fine. Infact I think only 1 server had a funny turn.

Although when the AC failed in our main comms room that wasn't so fun, the 6509 wasn't too happy.
 
Indeed, routers seem to be a little more temperamental it seems, I've never had a failure there though, they just get *really* warm.

I'm actually pursuing from the green angle myself. End of the day datacenters will shortly overtake air travel as a source of greenhouse emissions, but whether you believe in global warming or not it's a cost reduction
 
Datacenter is a constant 22 degrees. In the office though we have never had authorisation for air con, so the room is always ambient. 21 degrees monday morning but summer can be up to 32. In three years never had a hardware failure and the office and DC have very similar kit. People having AC below 20 degrees just seems to be wasting power.
 
bigredshark said:
I'm actually pursuing from the green angle myself. End of the day datacenters will shortly overtake air travel as a source of greenhouse emissions, but whether you believe in global warming or not it's a cost reduction
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It's tricky, my place are very hot (pardon the pun, not intended!) on green issues, however my personal views are a little different :)

We're not allowed/do not have aircon in the actual offices themselves. I think originall it was merely down to the cost of putting it in, now it'd definitely be refused from the green angle alone.

As it's government they will of course welcome the cost savings with open arms esp since budgets are being cut around the place.

Will post up if we do go down the route of upping the temps, but not sure how well it'll work as we're only small with v small server and comms rooms.
 
Ev0 said:
Although when the AC failed in our main comms room that wasn't so fun, the 6509 wasn't too happy.
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How hot did it get? Our 6509's were perfectly happy to sit in a room with ambient temp of 39*C and still had 8*c left on the ASICs IIRC. They have a very high warn temperature 85*C iirc. We lost a lot of HDD's that day. :(
 
I can't remember off the top of my head but do remember it was quite a bit above 39.

I remember the facilities guys saying they were worried about opening the door in case of fire, and some of the glass around the room was so hot you couldn't touch it without it hurting lol.
 
Got to remember, especially in the absence of cold aisle containment, temperature inside the equipmnet will be notably higher than ambient.

Particularly with networking kit it seems, the first few generations of MPLS core routers were notably bad, we still use a fair few Foundry 8 slot XMRs, which vent hot air out the side (and it's properly hot, 10Gbit line cards seem to run at 60 degrees+ even when the room temp is 20). I don't really know what their engineers were thinking to be honest, it's a nightmare to keep them cool. Lower end Juniper M series boxes had/have the same issue but don't generate so much heat.

That said most new kit has front to back cooling now so it's less of a problem.
 
We had our server room down to 13 deg the other day, whilst finishing of an install of new cooling. We have two systems for resilience, and running on one with the fans on full, we had 13, I would shudder to think what it would be in there with both of them on full blast.
 
18-20°C is normal in our case but when we were having the new aircons fitted the temp when down to 7°C the highest was 35-40°C and servers started to shutdown and server alarms went off.
 
18-20°C here as well, Our air con doesn't go much lower and all our server are kept on the top floor of the building.

Comms room is the same temp also
 
I went to CSC Datacentre in Kingswood and I am not joking but in the rooms it felt below 10C easily in there, there were hundreds and hundreds of servers all rackmounted everywhere. Kingswood in Bristol btw.

Apparently they host stuff for the NHS databases and a lot more besides.
 
22oC i set the air con too, any lower and it's uncomfortable to work in (and a pointless waste of energy) 22-24oC i feel is ideal, its a nice working temperature for people and equipment
 
My dc at school runs at around 16C ambience and about 25 behind the cabinets (I'm a tech so that's how I know lol)

the dc that the host I do tech support for runs at a nice and chilly 12c
 
A friend of mine recently measured the ambient temp of a radio station apps bay (server room to you lot :p) at 50C. Lots of stuff was broken. Although to be fair, once it had cooled down i think most if not all of it worked again.
 
Haha Dave

I was in our Radio Station Group server room tonight fixing a server, when I should have been playing wii sports with my mates lol.

Very cold in there, but then there are 3 AC units all set to 18c. Needs it though because there are a tonne of servers in there.
 
I used to leave a coat at my old work so I could use it when going in and spending a prolonged period of time in the server room :D
 
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