nanog mailing list archives

Re: "Hypothetical" Datacenter Overheating


From: sronan () ronan-online com
Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2024 02:41:41 -0500

Good thing there are no windows at this “hypothetical” location :)

On Jan 16, 2024, at 1:51 AM, bzs () theworld com wrote:


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 () 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... :-(




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