Personally, because our business won't buy aircon for the server room (to be fair, its only got a couple of servers in) the problem in our case is quite literally IT meltdown and I rather suspect that a lot of SME's are the same...
You still reading us? Not for long! Summer is THE IT meltdown hot spot
Most IT outages in 2012 occurred during the months of June and July, a technology provider has said. John Gentry, vice president of marketing at Virtual Instruments, said 60 per cent of IT outages for the year occurred during the two summer months. Gentry said factors such as IT experts taking holidays, the stress on mobile …
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Friday 2nd August 2013 12:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
I agree, it's pretty fundamental. Which is why we don't have it either - anon for obvious reasons !
We cool our server room just with air - and TBH that works pretty well although we could do with some filters as it does tend to bring a bit of dirt in. The problem is when you double or quadruple your loads without increasing the airflow to suit - then you end up with the servers sucking hot air round from the back of the rack and things "heat up" somewhat in warm weather. We've now got a large evaporative cooler (cheap, second hand !) sat in the front of the server room which does help - though it takes a bit of filling up (but carrying a container of water and saying you're "just topping up the servers" does raise eyebrows !).
As usual, there's a Dilbert for that !
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-08-09/
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Friday 19th July 2013 08:12 GMT Scarborough Dave
we had the same issue so managed to buy one of these
http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/4250832.htm
having proved my point of a trouble free summer (bet the equivalent of bonus on the solution) we now have a proper unit in our small server room/cupboard.
the old unit now keeps me cool in summer in my office/cupboard.
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Friday 19th July 2013 08:38 GMT MJI
Aircon
Also important for developers, cannot code when overheating.
Just that I have 3 PCs under my desk (2 working, XP and 7, 98 just sits there), and despite the XP being a celeryon and slow it heats my legs.
My quad core 7 is not as hot.
My old 10 year old home PC P4 I used at work for a while after the last work PC blew up, was much faster than the celeryon, it (celeryon) moved to my desk after its previous user left. it is used for XP tasks.
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Friday 19th July 2013 09:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
on the brink
our air con is on the brink! We had the chillers serviced last week and the y normally run at around 175PSI they were over 300! The amount of stuff in our server room has spiralled over the last 5 years and there's now 12 full 42U racks including a HPC cluster + 19 switches over 1.5PB storage and a 99 node gridengine, the poor old air con and power just haven't kept pace with the kit
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Friday 19th July 2013 11:59 GMT Anonymous Coward
FFS...
Damien Saunders, director of the cloud networking group within systems availability provider Citrix, said system down-time was just a "symptom" that could be attributed to a loss of connectivity, availability of staff or "unintentional increase of traffic" taking down websites.
I hope this wasn't the most relevant contribution by Mr Saunders...