Cooling Challenges an Issue In Rackspace Outage

miller60 writes "If your data center's cooling system fails, how long do you have before your servers overheat? The shrinking window for recovery from a grid power outage appears to have been an issue in Monday night's downtime for some customers of Rackspace, which has historically been among the most reliable hosting providers. The company's Dallas data center lost power when a traffic accident damaged a nearby power transformer. There were difficulties getting the chillers fully back online (it's not clear if this was equipment issues or subsequent power bumps) and temperatures rose in the data center, forcing Rackspace to take customer servers offline to protect the equipment. A recent study found that a data center running at 5 kilowatts per server cabinet may experience a thermal shutdown in as little as three minutes during a power outage. The short recovery window from cooling outages has been a hot topic in discussions of data center energy efficiency. One strategy being actively debated is raising the temperature set point in the data center, which trims power bills but may create a less forgiving environment in a cooling outage."

Damn dihydrogen monoxide

[wsanders]

They should ban that stuff. (dhmo.org)

Ironic advertisement

[davidwr]

Ah, the dangers of context-sensitive advertising.

Ad on the main page [2mdn.net] when this article was at the top of the list.

Does "50% off setup" mean you'll only be set up halfway before they run out of A/C?

Maxwells data center

[techpawn]

We've summoned a small demon to let in cool air particles and shunt out hot ones. Sure the weekly sacrifice gets to be a pain after a while, but there's always a pool of willing interns right?

Re:How to estimate the cooling needs?

[JUSTONEMORELATTE]

Believe it or not, but in one of those "life coincidences", pi is a safe approximation. Take the number of watts your equipment, lighting, etc., use, multiply by pi, and that's the # of btus of cooling. Don't forget to include 100 watts per person for body heat.

It'll be 90F degrees outside, and you'll be a cool 66F.

And if that doesn't work, you can always tell your VP that you were taking your numbers from some guy named TrollTalk on ./
I'm sure he'll understand.

Re:How to estimate the cooling needs?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Don't forget that nerds and geeks often have much more surface area than
> the standard professor, leading to higher heat loss into the cooler server room.

Not to even think about the actual situation during power outtakes:

When power is lost, all the geeks are going to be really excited and sweating (and heating) very much more than normally!