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The 100 Degree Data Center
miller60 writes "Are you ready for the 100-degree data center? Rackable Systems has introduced a new enclosure that it says can run high-density racks safely in environments as hot as 104 degrees (40 degrees C), offering customers the option of saving energy in their data center. Most data centers operate in a range between 68 and 74 degrees. Raising the thermostat can lower the power bill, allowing data centers to use less power for cooling. But higher temperatures can be less forgiving in the event of a cooling failure, and not likely to be welcomed by employees working in the data center."
Its better
I'd be happy with a 75-degree data center.
Depending on the climate this could be great. Would be more useful in Nothern Europe or Canada than in the hotter regions of this planet though.
As for the room temperature in the datacenter: who cares. 100 degrees or 0 degrees: it wasn't a hospitable climate anyway, noisy too, and with Halon fire extinguishers noone in their right mind would want to spend extended lengths of time in there anyway.
Our servers were recently moved to our sauna room to save space. Finally, a product that will work for all businesses who have done the same.
it will run at 100 degrees Fahrenheit and not crash, but for how long?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I'd be mostly concerned about the lifespan of hard drives at these temperatures. The electronics can be easily made to tolerate heat, but drives are a weak link. The bearings and lubricants are especially vulnerable.
Throw some sand on the floor (it is conductive after all and the racks are enclosed anyways right?), Relax dress attire to allow for sandals and shorts (not too much relaxing, as IT personel and skimpy clothing rarely mix), and you will attract more IT personnel due to the tropic weather in your location!
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
and a hawaiian shirt to work. I wonder if they will let me put some beach sounds on the server room stereo. :)
I realize it's the trendy thing these days to target the data center as an area of concern monetarily, but this is a little ridiculous.
All it will take is one poor geek spending a 12 hour day in the data center for this to be deemed a horrible idea. (Like that never happens)
Seriously, this is retarded. If you do your cooling and power CORRECTLY, you won't have a ridiculous bill and your data center will be at a more reasonable temperature.
I hate really hot weather...you can always put on more clothes, but you reach a limit on what you can take off.
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"...But higher temperatures can be less forgiving in the event of a cooling failure, and not likely to be welcomed by employees working in the data center."
Not welcome? That all depends, on if I can relocate my Data Center to a topless beach in Miami. Sure beats the current scenery, and the dress code would likely change.
Of course, the fact that you probably don't want to see your average IT person running around topless wearing a thong is another matter entirely...
Buildings provide hot water for washing hands etc. Cold water comes in from outside and is heated using electricity or gas to make hot water which costs money and energy.
Pipe the cold water (which is usually somewhere between 0 and 20 degrees C) through heat exchangers in the hot data centre before heating it up to working temperature with gas or electricity.
That way, you reduce the data centre's temperature to more like 20-25C, and you heat the water up by 10C (say) saving on gas or electricity bills since there is less of a temperature difference to get it up to the required temperature.
I eagerly await my Nobel Prize for Common Sense.
Stick Men
Teach Bikram's Yoga in there! Extra cash and Yoga babes sweating!
The proper question is "Are our coworkers ready to deal with how we'll smell like after spending time in that server room?" It'll smell like a monkey house, but probably with less feces. Unless we're working with that superstar bastard programmer a few articles back who poo'd in the lobby.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I can't really imagine myself working in a 40C environment with bad air
welcome our new sweaty sysadmins.
Would the heat leach out the walls into cooler offices/spaces? If so, then you are basically forcing your neighbouring offices to cool your server room.
Spelling is illogical, so why even bother?
And since heat exchangers never leak, there's no problem putting them in the data center with all the electrical devices...
Best Slashdot Co
We have an 80 degree data center. It's not particularly pleasant to be in (as you get buffeted by hotter winds coming off of power supplies), but we haven't seen any more failures than normal.
How about completely immersing the entire data center in oil? You may need some sort of SCUBA gear to to server maintenance though.
The failure rate of electronics increases dramatically at higher temperatures. My recollection from my product qualification days is that a hard drive will fail at least 3x faster at 100F (40C) than at room temperature. This may be a bad idea and actually cost more money in the long term.
Don't conductors generally get more resistive when they heat up?
Is there a cost to data centers when their computers' circuits become more resistive?
But this would mean that we'd need a new law, banning any manager from trying to enforce any sort of dress code above and beyond "please wear clothing" for the IT department. If I'm going to be working in a warm data center, there's no way in hell that I'm dressing in 'business casual.' Management can kiss my ass. :)
I wouldn't mind a DC between 75 and 80 degree F. I'm tired of shivering when I walk into the DC. Of course I'm not constantly racking larger servers. Those guys might like it sub 70.
Think Deeply.
if I can relocate my Data Center to a topless beach in Miami.
Dude, have you ever been to a topless beach? (Car analogy time) For every Ferrari you'll see, there will be 200 rusted broken-down Yugos.
I would consider relocating to said topless beach only if you enjoy rusted broken down Yugos. ;-P
Great, now you've done it. I'll never convince Bobby to come now, he happens to drive a Yugo...
I have never understood why data centers located in colder climates need cooling systems. Surely the only thing they need is access to as much outside temperature as possible and humidity filters? The other solution is to design data centers to use things like Windcatchers to use natural physical processes.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
...not likely to be welcomed by employees working in the data center.
Especially big fat sweaty BOFHs ;-)
We're setting up a small data center in the UK - our first room holds just 24 racks and we're going to trial heat management with outside air ventilation and evaporative cooling (that's swamp coolers to our American brethren). If we fill the whole floor with this we think we'll save about £450k a year in aircon costs. That's a lot of disks, even if taking the maximum temperature of exhaust air from a machine to around 32degC (based on an input temperature of 22degC) does shorten disk lifespan. (Seagate say 5degC to 60degC)
Yes there saving money on cooling cost, or at least they seem to believe that and I am sure when they fail to take everything into account this is true.
The reality it the server room still has to pull that heat out. Increased Delta T is just lost energy.
Here is really why it's a terrible idea.
1.) Component failures. Of all parts from bearing in the drives, and fans to the silicon itself has a much higher failure rate.
2.) The components use more power at higher temperatures! This is from increased leakage currents in the silicon.
Below is a graph from Research My Startup company did!
http://www.silentcomputing.com/tech/market2.gif
They really need to used ducted air or any other technology to reduce the Delta T! By this I mean bring the cooling as close to the components as possible.
Right now server rooms need to run internally at 10C to 15C to keep the CPU chips below 60C.
If they just brought the cooling directly to the cpu's and let that cool spread from there they could use out door passive radiators! 0 air conditioning cost and the most power savings.
This is what my start was doing till someone tried to steal the who damb thing and sunk the company.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Corrected that for you. Assuming, by nerds, you meant scientists and engineers, and not people outside of America. :)
373.15 - Water boils at 1 atmosphere 310 - Very hot 300 - Hot 290 - Nice 280 - Chilly 273.15 - Water freezes at 1 atmosphere 0 - absolute zero! how easy is that.
'xactly. These trolls try to go anti-US with their fancy metric system then they fuck it up with Centigrade. Try plugging centigrade temperatures into the ideal gas law and lemme know how it goes. ;)
Hallelujah.
I'm all for meters and grams - Those are sensible units and convenient for everyday use. But there aren't many conversions that I do regularly that demand centigrade. We're humans and temperature measurements, in most cases for most people, are used to tell us how comfortable we're going to be. Fahrenheit was made for that and does a better job than centigrade - I don't give a damn about how the local duck pond is going to feel about the weather tomorrow, I want to know whether to wear shorts or a jacket. And monitoring my PC case temp in F is no more or less difficult than in C - It's not like either scale is tuned specifically for hardware comfort.
And, like you said, what does centigrade have over Kelvin? It's not like we're making computations easier by multiplying by 0 or 100 for freezing or boiling...
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Personally, I can only see this taking off in industrial environments where the server room is very hard/expensive to keep cool.
The concept of running a server room that warm, is just plain foolish really... I can see the techs now, sweating all over the place, fumbling with cables on the telco patch or else fumbing and sweating all over a server that they are installing... just not good really.
To have equipment able to tolerate these temperatures is a good thing, I agree to that, but this kind of system really shouldn't be targeting the standard datacenter/server room. It should target High Industry where they are going to be put in environments where heat is a constant, no matter what.
Now, as to savings, yeah, you could definitely save a few dollars by increasing the temp a bit on the server room, everyone knows that, but who in their right mind would want to crank a server room to 104 farenheit just to save a few dollars that you may not be saving depending on the TCO of these new racks.
40*C could easily give you a heat stroke... I know 'cause it has happened to me and friends in a hot Greek summer.
Maybe the Sun had to do something with it and not the temperature itself but I don't think that it's unreasonable for 40*C to cause health issues.
And not too few people died this summer all over Europe in similar temperatures...
Especially when you go from spending 8 hours in a 40*C room and then going out to let's say 20*C...
but you reach a limit on what you can take off.
40C is barely above body temperature. I would be quite comfortable prancing around the server room wearing nothing. Throw some cedar on the rack and call it a sauna. You could make your employees pay a membership fee.
Of course this will do nothing to correct the tech gender divide.
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
A single degree Celsius is qualitatively a bit too big, to the point where most European climate-control systems with digital displays have to resort to using half-degrees as the base control unit.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I for one welcome our new sweaty sysadmins.
What are you going to do with the old ones?
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
The metric system is unified in all directions, time, mass, length, temperature, energy etc...
The system makes sense instead of relying on the length on the king's thumb, foot and arm, or the weight of a stone or the amount of work being done by a horse, all variable and inconsistent.
Its one of the many things we owe the French under Napoleon, like a unified system of laws, the "Code Napoleon."
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
What? Nobody needs to be more accurate than 1C for day-to-day casual usage.
Have you noticed that all recent European HVAC systems use half-degrees as the standard control increment? Sounds like someone wants a degree of approximately Fahrenheit size as the base unit.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
SUN already beat you to it... /. when it first came out...
http://www.sun.com/products/sunmd/s20/specifications.jsp#Anchor6
It was also posted on
I have a few Rackable boxes now in our normally cooled data center. They are used as high density storage servers so they have a lot of disk drives, but they loose drives at a much higher rate than our other Dell and Supermicro based clones. You have to tread lightly around them because the slightest vibration will cause them to reboot. Yes they are properly mounted, etc.
Rackable == cheaply made
Why don't you do some research if you are a "nerd"?
There are arguments to be made in favor of metric, but not a single one of them has occurred in this thread yet.
Fahrenheit has advantages too. BUT you'd actually, y'know, have to READ or EXPERIMENT to find that out... instead of just repeating stupid hearsay like a typical footballer.
Here in Finland we would probably toss some water on the racks, beat each other with birch twigs and roll in snow afterwards.
Bot Assisted Blogging
Just read the first page of comments, not a single entry actually about the data center stuff. I was just wondering how much you sys admins were going to like those temps. Time to see which company makes Air Conditioning cooling suits for humans and invest in stock (and a suit) ...mostly because NO ONE is going to want to be around you guys if all you are wearing is a thong and flip flops. This is cosmic truthiness.
Unless you have amazing ventilation, 100F ambient is going to mean up to 140F inside the cases. You'll cook your chips.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
...but the servers aren't the only thing in a data center. If the switches and routers can't take the higher heat, then you aren't going to get much use out of those servers.
If you can't beat them, embrace and extend them.
104 degrees would be on the high side, but won't be reached as an average temperature. Even in the U.S. deep south, a 100 degree day is an oddity (Florida is geographically southeast, but it is not culturally the South). Given a sufficient volume of air, the datacenter should be able to operate just a few degrees above the outside temperature with just a heat exchanger rather than a chiller.
In the case where you don't have a dedicated server center and just a server room, use the heat from the servers (about 1000 Btu an hour, per server) to heat your facility at night. That's what we do.
http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=sb_success.sb_successstories2008_johnsonbraund
I also fail to see the point. Each server is going to add X amount of heat to the room as it operates, so the AC system needs to remove X amount of heat to maintain a stable temperature. Overall, the AC system has to do roughtly the same amount of work. The higher room temperature will give you a greater temperature difference for your exchnage medium (water usually), so that shouold give you some higher efficiency as you cool it with ambient outside air. Based on the previous post, however, it looks like this increased efficiency will be lost by the added power required for the CPUs to run at the higher temperature (they will actually be producing more heat than they would if running cooler). End result... Basically no real savings, just a pissed off IT team. While there may be ways to reduce data center cooling costs, this isn't it!
Keep passing the open windows...
The range of "habitable temperatures" for humans probably depends on the human and what temperature they are used to.
It reaches 45C/113F here occasionally, goes over 40C/104F regularly, and I'm still alive. 100F/36 Degrees is quite pleasant for going to the beach or sitting on the shade with a drink... not so pleasant for working and by law manual laborers do not need to work at 40C/104F and above.
This is a fabulous idea. With temps that high, IT people won't hang out or hide in the data center. With less exposure to IT admins and their personality problems, computers will be less likely to revolt and exterminate humanity.
Toss in some sun lamps and and some sand and a pond on one side, and I am so down with a 100 degree data center.
The idea of operating data centers at much higher temperatures for the sake of saving energy is flawed. The cooling load due to watts dissipated in the form of heat is constant no matter what the room temperature is. The heat gains through the building envelope are extremely small compared to the heat off the equipment and lights, and any small savings from a higher room temperature could be instantly wiped out by any equipment failure.
Don't do it. Just because manufacturers spec their equipment as being able to operate at up to 40 C (and can go higher than that) doesn't mean you should do it. And don't forget the people who have to work there.
Bottom line, it's a dumb idea.
How are those CentiDays working out?
...won't be working there.
Attach pipes to it, REAL pipes, use them as central heating for the offices surrounding the serverspace.
pro's: efficient use of energy, never cold walls ;)
con's: system administrator absolutely love heat when they work around the clock
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Easy, when some politician figures out how to capitalize on it for political gain. Write to your representatives and tell them we need metric conversion jobs to save the economy. If your country already converted to metric, tell them you need to convert back in order to create jobs to save the economy. If we convert back and forth frequently enough, we should be able to stave off another recession indefinitely.
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And you cook meat to various safe temperatures:
(Note that I arrived at the Celsius figures by converting Fahrenheit. Five minutes of googling and I could not find a single site that listed food temperatures from the whole *.co.uk hierarchy. Apparently cooking with Celsius is easier because in Fahrenheit you have to cook to a certain temp and in Celsius you just arbitrarily decide it's done...)
The real benefit to a 100F setpoint is the free cooling it allows. You can use filtered out door air or evaporatively cooled water from a cooling tower to keep a datacenter at 100F year round just about anywhere. This is a 90% reduction in cooling energy right there using decades old, mature HVAC tech.
http://www.xkcd.com/526/
We moved all our DC's to third world countries. I don't care how hot they get.
I have always had the noise & heat from multiple computers and a stack of devices humming around my desk. Just recently I moved from the city to the country where I have for the first time a real house with a real garage. After running cat6 from several rooms to the garage, I have been able to consolidate most of the equipment there (CATVmodem, router, switch, wireless AP, VoIP devices, printer & fileserver) and was thrilled to move everything away from the rooms I spend my time in. I have generally believed that all hardware will be happier in colder environments (the garage is not insulated), however we have been having an unusually cold winter for this area (down to freezing a few times) and I'm second guessing my decision. According to the red book (now purple), "The ideal operating temperature for computer equipment is 64 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit, with about 45% humidity". I'm wondering about Slashdot reader's experiences with home 'datacenters' regarding environment and any best practices."
May I point out the obvious: not only the higher power consumption comes from increased leakage currents in the silicon, but it also comes from the fact that power supplies are less efficient at higher temperatures, so they need to pull more current from the wall socket to maintain the same output current.
However what you and I just said is irrelevant. As your graph shows, the difference in power consumption is very minimal: 2% for each 10C due to leakage currents, and maybe ~5% for each 10C in decreased PSU efficiency. These few percentage points are nothing compared to the amount of power you would save by making the AC work less hard. Indeed, if without AC the datacenter would reach 140F (333 Kelvin), cooling it down to 60F (289 Kelvin) requires removing 44 Kelvin of heat, whereas cooling it down to 100F (311 Kelvin) only requires removing 22 Kelvin of heat, therefore running it at 100F would roughly reduce the AC power consumption by 50% ! So the point made by TFA still holds: overall you still are saving energy by running a whole datacenter at a 10C higher temperature.
As to the higher component failure rate: as it was proven by 2 independent studies last year (Google and CMU), higher temperatures do not even correlate with higher hdd failure rates. In fact, strangely they observed a slight reverse effect: hdd tended to fail less often !
I work in a data center, shorts & sandals are banned.
100 F degrees would be miserable in blue jeans, and if we were permitted shorts, it would be fun until your leg gets scrapped by a fully loaded 120 lb + server/raid array.
I think 100 F degrees might also scare away potential and existing customers on the monthly company tour past the server Farms since many of us would be scantily clad, sweaty overweight men in need of a shave and a haircut.
However it could give a new impetus for my desire to streak past a tour group. :-)
Since Fahrenheit degrees are half the size of Celsius degrees, it'd be Celsius that forced the need for smaller increments than full degrees before Fahrenheit did.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
... higher temperatures ... not likely to be welcomed by employees working in the data center.
Simple solution: COMPUTE NAKED!
Hi folks,
My imagination says there will be future form of computer made up of fluid cooled blocks clamped to seal in slide in 'boards'. One would either have thermally controlled baffles to divide the flow, or rigid ones in a cheaper verions. I suspect a fine fluid for the job would be silicone oils. It would be great to see equipment smaller and more heat tolerant to abusive environments, among other things; as more equipment keeps going into the field in the endeavor to serve.
Sincerely, Gregory D. MELLOTT
"The greatest among you is the servant of all. Now remember that robot. (They won't make the grade either.)"