Anatomy of a server-room meltdown
Published: 02 Aug 2004 16:35 BST
"They told us we can drain the old system and continue to use that coolant with the new aircon unit - it's just that they would not have been able to sell us the old type of coolant," he says.
But, just when it seemed like there could be a glimmer of hope on the horizon, the gods of misfortune went to work on Bob again. The second aircon unit on the roof, which had been working single-handedly for the past week and a half, collapsed under the pressure. Bob had returned the rental equipment that had been jamming that door open so - you guessed it - the comms room shut down yet again.
"So we were back to square one. We had to go and get another aircon unit." This, after several weeks of server crashes, finally fixed the problem.
Bob believes his company is not alone in facing such issues, given that many aircon units servicing comms and server rooms are probably by now about seven or eight years old, and may well have been forgotten about as servers are constantly upgraded.
The heat problem is made all the more frustrating because it has overtaken space as the major limiting factor on the potential power output of Bob's comms room. Servers may be getting smaller but the space saving means nothing if they can't be kept cool.
Bob is in the process of replacing ageing 8U servers, running on relatively cool (and slow) PIIs that have a couple of 7,000 rpm disk drives with 2U, dual-process servers that have Xeon processors and 15,000 rpm disk drives, but the server racks in Bob's comms room will never be full again. Although the 2U servers will do the job that is required of them, there is little prospect of taking full advantage of their small size and dramatically ramping up processing resources: the aircon simply won't take it.
In a final twist to the tale, Bob recently learned that even if he manages to sort the aircon issue, the building owners and the local power company are unable to supply any more power for any potential servers that could be slotted into the freed-up space.
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