Re: Snark .....
You'd be surprised.
While it may not be much, there is a mass fo air in the room, plus all the metalwork, and of course the mass of the walls (and floors and ceilings). If the heat input isn't too much above what can be lost through conduction through all these surfaces, then the thermal mass can be enough to delay heat rise by some amount.
The downside is, when you have got the racks, cabinets, server hardware, walls, and thick concrete floor slab up to some silly temperature - it also takes time for it to cool off.
This is noticeable in houses etc. I've know people who live in old stone houses of the sort where doorways are more like short corridors. They tend to be cool in summer, and cooler but not cold in winter - because of the thermal mass in the walls. That does depend on having a typical British summer where there are a few very hot days, and winters where there are a few very cold days - if it's really hot or really cold for long enough then the thermal mass is eventually used up. Unfortunately, we've yet to persuade one of our church wardens that leaving the building cold all week, then heating it "only just enough" to be survivable for the length of a service, does not do much for the fabric of the building - take cold walls, heat the air (but not long enough to warm the walls at all), add moisture generators (humans), and you can see the paint change colour with the condensation, revealing the internal structure of the wall in a "mottled" effect. When he's not around, we set the timer to come on a couple of hours earlier to try and give the plastered surface a fighting chance of survival.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
