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 19th July 2013 07:41 GMT Peter2

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...

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1. Friday 19th July 2013 08:08 GMT Piro
  
  Air con for the server room is a basic necessity.
  
  I'd argue if the business can't do that, they clearly have bigger problems.
  
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  1. 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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2. 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 08:12 GMT Jabba

Our servers often require unscheduled "maintenance" during hot summer weather.... Oddly the server room is the only part of the building with Air-Con.... I'll be found there twiddling knobs, plugging wires and generally looking busy (but also cool)

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1. Friday 19th July 2013 14:45 GMT phuzz
  
  I've done the same, although I used to find that the floor behind the racks was the perfect temperature for a nap.
  
  It's also a nice warm place to go in the winter, especially if a manager has turned off all the heating over christmas to save money, so the offices are practically at freezing.
  
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Friday 19th July 2013 08:20 GMT Ben Rosenthal

I don't have words to express how glad I am to have finished my week on call today.

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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 08:38 GMT Wulfy

Got into work this morning to find a honking big genny purring away..... IT had been up all night after getting alerts all night, apparently a major power switch had failed . Gotta love this weather lol

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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 09:52 GMT Peter Marshall

Seen this article before? Suggests that disk failure is more likely when server temps are kept too low.

http://www.carbondescent.org.uk/blog/?p=164

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1. Friday 19th July 2013 10:24 GMT Piro
  
  However, I've just experienced a couple of power supplies failing due to extreme temperatures in a room with servers that had no AC.
  
  Screw the disks, when the temps reach into the 40s, you're in trouble.
  
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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...

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Friday 19th July 2013 15:26 GMT cyberdemon

Servers don't like heat

In other news, cats discovered to dislike baths, the pope announces that he is in fact catholic.

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