Re: [LUG] Datacentre bits

[Simon Waters <Simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

John Daragon wrote:
> In my (limited) experience, actual temperature isn't the only issue. 
> Redundancy is good. We once had a single external heat exchanger fan ice up 
> (it was cold outside). This caused a machine room zone hotspot so fast that 
> after less than 10 minutes 9 mainframes went down like a row of dominoes.

I'm guessing all your mainframes shutdown nicely because they detected
it was too hot, rather than any sort of hardware failure? They can be picky.

I agree with the comment that temperature probably isn't the issue -
thermal stresses will occur when components are warming or cooling - so
stability in temperature is probably more important than the absolute
temperature.

Humidity is a killer - especially for tape drives - which usually
specify both an upper and lower limit - someone did explain the lower
limit to me once but my mind retained only the fact that it matters.

Dust is my bugbear - whilst the big datacenters do okay - a lot of
corporates keep their printers near their other hardware - and paper
dust (and toner) are both dreadful for removable magnetic media (and
maintenance engineers, and cooling fans).

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