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Emergency Cooling with Limited Power?
Nos. asks: "I work for a small webhosting company (I'm on leave from my Gov't job) and we've started having some power problems. Actually someone managed to blow out the substation powering the area so we're piggy backing off another one, and they're slowly powering more and more things off. Elevators, lights, etc. are gone. Since the building we work in has a few IT company's working it in, they're trying as hard as they can to keep the A/C running, but its not looking good. As such, the possibility exists that our server room could get very warm, very quickly. Since we've already powered off everything that's not essential, we're starting to look at ways to keep the room cool without using a lot of power. Generators an small A/C units are a last resort as it would mean holes in the walls. The only thing we've been able to come up with is dry ice and some small fans to circulate the air. Of course this is happening as we're heading in to a week of over 30C days. Does Slashdot have any ideas?"
There's a lot of things that were out of whack when I started here about 6 months ago, I'm working on it. Redundant air was just not something I considered
Why do you host at a place without dual power companies providing power?
Because we don't have two power companies here. I live in Saskatchewan (Canada) and we only have one power company
Why do you host at a place without dual redundant A/C on EACH power provider?
The office is located on the University or Regina campus. The campus provides heating and cooling to every building here. Redundant A/C is out of the question on that kind of scale for this small a community (~225,000)
Why do you host at a place without dual redundant power generators?
We have natural gas generators, however, they only power certain things within this building, not the A/C for the campus.
Just how "essential" is the stuff you're hosting?
Depends who you talk to. Our clients think they're sites are critical to their business. If we can't maintain uptime, we lose clients. If we lose enough clients we go out of business, and I lose this job, and get stuck going back to the Government, something I DON'T want to do
The Gov't Job was for anyone reading my profile and wondering why I say I work for the Gov't and now say I work for a web hosting company. Its not an excuse. Secondly, I have been working on improving things here, but I was brought in for a development project which recently finished. Only lately have I started to work on the network, servers, facilities, etc.