What's the Proper Temperature for a Server Room?

Izzard asks: "As a network engineer, I sometimes have to spend many hours in other people's server rooms. One in particular has a good few servers, DVD jukebox, plenty of monitors and switches etc. It's a thick, stone-walled room with a big door. It would get very, very warm were it not for the two huge air conditioning units in there. Someone has decided that these units will be set to maintain a constant air temperature of 17-18 deg. C (62-64F). After an hour or so of sitting in the air stream from these units my legs go numb and fall off and I can't type. Now my guess is that it would be fine to set the units to maintain, say, 21-22 deg. C (70-71F) to make it more comfortable for those of us who have to work in there. This argument comes up a lot, and my position is that the room doesn't need to be refrigerated, *per se*...it only needs to be prevented from overheating. Consequently I maintain that a *consistent* temperature of 'pleasant' for the room is almost as good a consistent temperature of 'a bit nippy'. Is there a definitive answer to this?"

Comments

If you can't stand the cold...

[j.e.hahn]

...stay out of the data center. While I can't backup with studies, or any hard scientific evidence, I can support that with experience. A real server room will have hot spots, sometimes 20+ degrees over the mean temperature the room (especially poorly ventilated ones. Big ACs don't equal good ventilation, btw.)

These hot spots can (and are often) murder for server farms. Take a page from the experts (i.e. big colo firms): keep your data center cold, and have lots of airflow near the racks.

This isn't necessarily always true, and a small data center can probably afford to not be frigid. But if you've got a lot of money in your data center which would you prefer: big, expenive AC bills or more expensive outages on very expensive hardware?

Boo hoo

[flikx]

Wear a sweater. Server rooms don't need to be the same temperature and central Africa. Get a grip.

I pay close to $120 a month to keep my apartment 62F year round, and I save a huge amount of money because I don't have to constantly repair and replace equipment.