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On Wednesday 28 April 2004 18:36, Simon Waters wrote:
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.
Yup, though "nicely" would have been an interesting concept at the time... But it *was* hot.
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.
Static. Especially around tape drives, but it makes everything else a bit sparky, too.
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).
jd -- John Daragon argv[0] limited john@xxxxxxxxxx Lambs Lawn Cottage, Staple Fitzpaine, Taunton TA3 5SL, UK (house) 01460 234537 (office) 01460 234068 (mobile) 07836 576127 (fax) 01460 234069 -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.